Anonymous American
Ship figurehead: female bust
1801­15
White pine
ht.: 54.6 cm
George F. Harding Collection, 1982.1178

Figureheads were placed at the prow (the forward tip) of a ship, where they faced into the wind and were battered by heavy seas, sleet, and snow. This lady looks upward as if asking Heaven to guard the ship’s passage. What tells you that she must have made many voyages? 

The carver of this figurehead was one of the skilled ship carvers who worked in the busy ports of the East Coast in the great days of American sailing ships, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.