Working Waterfronts - the paintings of maritime artist, Peter K. Eagleton

The tug Pegasus was built in 1907 as the Standard Oil Co. No. 16 and served waterside refineries and terminals of Standard Oil. When McAllister acquired her in 1953, her original steam engine was replaced with diesel. Pamela Hepburn of Hepburn Marine Incorporated bought her in 1987 to tow oil barges and railroad car-floats, along with other transport work, and it was then that she was renamed Pegasus. Retired in 1997 after a 90-year career, she underwent extensive restoration work to serve as a training vessel and museum, and it is from this time period (c. 2000) that she is depicted in Eagleton’s painting. Although Pegasus was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001 as part of a preservation initiative, she was unfortunately scrapped in 2021.

Hudson River Maritime Museum are thrilled to announce a brand new exhibition, Working Waterfronts, displaying oil and pastel paintings by Hudson Valley maritime artist, Peter K. Eagleton. Working Waterfronts will open to the public on May 17 and be on display in the museum’s East Gallery through December 22, 2024. 

The late Peter K. Eagleton (1937-2005) was an accomplished artist of marine subjects and marine historian.  He was familiar with ships, tugboats, docks, and yards, encountering them, regularly during his career as a shipbroker. His strikingly vibrant and carefully composed paintings celebrate the world of working waterfronts and the graceful shapes of freighters, tugs, ships, lighters, yard oilers, and tankers that plied the waters of New York Harbor and the Hudson River.

Maritime Artist Peter Eagleton.

About Peter K. Eagleton  (1937-2005)
Born in Yonkers, New York,  Mr. Eagleton was an accomplished artist and marine historian. He worked for over 36 years in the steamship business as a shipbroker in New York and Scandinavia. He also served on a panel for the U.S. government negotiating trade rates with Asia. His memberships included the Salmagundi Club, The American Society of Marine Artists, the National Maritime Historical Society of America and the Edward Hopper Foundation, as well as an Official U.S. Coast Guard Artist. Eagleton also served for six years as a sergeant in the National Guard. His work was recognized by the Coast Guard’s George Gray Award for outstanding artistic achievement and his paintings appear in a number of significant marine art collections, including the National Coast Guard Museum, the American Merchant Marine Museum, the Mystic Seaport Museum, and the Intrepid Museum.

A red railroad barge lies against a deteriorating wooden pier outside of Edgewater, New Jersey, located just south of the George Washington Bridge. This type of vessel is known as a “lighter,” a flat-bottomed barge that transfers goods between moored ships in the harbor and a railroad terminus on shore. There were as many as 1000 of these covered barges operating in New York Harbor by 1950, and they were referred to collectively as the “Railroad Navy” since most were owned by the railroad companies with terminals in the greater New York area. Vessels like this one collected along Edgewater Flats, muddy shoals just north of the town, as waterfront industry declined in the second half of the 20th century. From 1994 through 1995, the Army Corps of Engineers engaged in a large project to clear more than 100 decommissioned and abandoned barges from the flats. Although the vessels may not have been operational, some were still used for a variety of purposes. The Knickerbocker Canoe Club, established in 1880, held monthly meetings aboard a steel barge on the flats and used two wooden barge hulks to store their gear. The New York Motorboat Club used two other barges nearby. Similarly, the barge pictured here has outlived its heyday as a working vessel, but smoke emanates from the chimney, indicating that someone still benefits from the warmth of the stove inside. The huge majority of these barges were surrendered and scrapped when the Army Corps of Engineers ordered the users to either refloat or lose the vessels. Two prominent examples of covered railroad barges have survived into the 21st century: Lehigh Valley No. 79 (1914), which now serves as the Waterfront Museum in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and the Pennsylvania Railroad No. 399 (1942), privately owned here on the Rondout Creek in Kingston.

Peter Eagleton’s paintings focus on the sometimes-unglamorous work boats of New York Harbor and the Hudson River: tugboats, barges, tankers, and ferries, all working to transport cargo and people from place to place. In the spirit of American Realism, the movement that began in literature in the late 19th century and in visual arts in the early 20th century, Eagleton chooses these everyday images of working waterfronts as the unconventional subjects of his art, finding beauty amidst the rust.
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Just as Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks famously offers a glimpse into the late-night scene of a diner with its three customers and singular server, as if the viewer of the painting is just walking past, Eagleton’s paintings act as a window into the often-overlooked world of marine transportation, scenes we pass daily as we drive over Hudson River bridges or down Abeel Street right here in Kingston. These paintings invite us to pause and consider these scenes not only as the unseen cogs in the commerce that powers our daily lives, but as aesthetic subjects in their own right.

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