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Grace Darling stands in the boat with one arm out to the survivors and an oar still in her other hand. The boat was her family's own, open and 21 feet long. Her father was the only other person rowing.

The Forfarshire was a modern ship, a paddle steamer on the Hull to Dundee run, and the modern part is what killed her. Her boilers failed in a full North Sea gale and the sails could not hold her. In the small hours of 7 September 1838 she struck Big Harcar rock in the Farne Islands and broke in two. The stern half went down with most of the 60-odd people aboard. The bow half wedged on the rock with a dozen survivors clinging to it in the dark. One of them was a woman named Sarah Dawson, holding two children who died of cold in her arms before daylight. At dawn, in the Longstone lighthouse a mile away, the keeper's daughter Grace Darling saw movement on the rock through a telescope. She was 22, the seventh of nine children, and had grown up out on the Farne Islands while her father kept the light. Her father William judged the sea too heavy for the mainland lifeboat to come out. That left one boat, their own, a 21-foot open rowing boat, and one crew, the two of them, because her brothers were ashore. They took the long way round, a mile of rowing in the shelter of the islands, because a straight line could not be rowed at all. At the rock, William jumped across to sort the living from the dead. Grace held the boat off the breaking reef by herself, an oar in each hand, in a gale. That is the part of the story working boatmen refused to believe until they had seen the water for themselves. Nine people came off in two trips, and she rowed the first load home through the same sea. What happened next had no precedent, because the mass newspaper had only just been invented and had never met a heroine before. Within weeks Grace Darling was the most famous young woman in the empire. Money was raised for her by public subscription, Wordsworth wrote a poem, and Queen Victoria sent 50 pounds. Portrait painters queued at the lighthouse in such numbers that her father complained the sittings were interrupting his work. Circus promoters offered money for her to sit in a boat on a stage. She declined the circus, answered the letters, stayed at the lighthouse, and died of tuberculosis four years later, at 26. The lifeboat service took her up after her death, and still names boats after her. The painting is French. Charles Achille d'Hardiviller made it in 1838, the same year as the rescue, which shows how fast the story crossed the Channel. He put the lighthouse out on the horizon, the wreck's red flag above the survivors, and Grace standing in the boat with her arm out. She is dressed far better than anyone rows in. Heroines were a new subject, and the painter reached for the older costume of angels.