look closer

Grace reaches across the last yard of water with an oar still in hand. Holding the coble off a breaking reef alone was the part watermen refused to believe.

The Forfarshire was a modern ship, a paddle steamer on the Hull to Dundee run, and she died of modernity: her boilers failed in a full North Sea gale, the sails could not hold her, and in the small hours of 7 September 1838 she struck Big Harcar rock in the Farne Islands and broke in two. The after half went down with most of the 60-odd people aboard. The forward half wedged on the rock with a dozen survivors clinging to it in the dark, among them 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, raised entirely on that pillar of wet granite. Her father William judged the sea too heavy for the mainland lifeboat to come out, which meant the only boat in the question was their own: a 21-foot wooden coble, and the only crew was the two of them, her brothers being ashore. They took the long way, a mile of rowing in the lee of the islands, because the direct line was unrowable. At the rock, William jumped across to sort the living from the dead, and Grace held the coble alone, off a breaking reef, in a gale, with an oar in each hand, the single feat inside the story that professional watermen refused to believe until they had seen the water. Nine people came off in two trips; 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: subscriptions, poems by Wordsworth, 50 pounds from the young Queen Victoria, portrait painters queuing at the lighthouse in such numbers that her father complained the sittings interrupted the light, circus promoters offering money for her to sit in a boat on stage. She declined the circus, answered the letters, stayed at the lighthouse, and died of tuberculosis four years later, at 26. The lifeboat institution she was posthumously adopted by still names boats after her. The painting is French, made the very year of the rescue by d'Hardiviller, which is its own datum: the story crossed the Channel at newspaper speed. He put the lighthouse on the horizon, the wreck's red flag of distress behind the survivors, and Grace at the bow reaching across the last yard of water, dressed considerably better than anyone rows in, because heroines were a new genre and the painter reached for the older costume of angels.