[Updated February 2021] Oil painting of the full-rigged ship ‘Fontenaye’ in full sail in starboard-broadside view. Employed in the China tea trade, she is shown here off a distant Chinese coast at right. Little is known about the ship, although there was later a barque of the same name which travelled between England and New Zealand in the 1880s.

The picture would have been painted while the ship was loading tea to bring back to England and it would have been considered a 'clipper' - which were broadly speaking square-rigged vessels with narrow, streamlined hulls that enabled them to travel at considerable speed. Because of the way commodity markets operated, such fast ships were needed for premium freights, such as tea from China in the years between about 1850 and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, though the tea races under sail lasted into the 1870s.