The Morgan referred to in this painting's title is probably the notorious Welsh pirate and privateer Henry Morgan who terrorised the Spanish in the Caribbean before eventually being knighted and becoming governor of Jamaica. He's likely the man with the red cloak and hand on his sword to the right of the picture.

Although leaning towards romanticism Gribble still did a huge amount of research for his historical scenes and was particularly noted for his command of period details and maritime minutiae. This painting hung outside Poole's Council Chambers for over 60 years.

His dramatic style attracted as many critics as admirers, particularly as artistic tastes changed. One critic described him rather sniffily as ‘a specialist in burning ships’, and even a guide to an exhibition of his works in 1995 felt the need to say ‘the overly romantic style of the large canvasses have a tendency to amuse rather than inspire...'

This didn’t stop him from being very successful, exhibiting at the Royal Academy multiple times and catching the eye of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who hung one of his paintings, The Return of the Mayflower, in the White House when he became President of the United States in 1933.

Beyond his huge historical canvases Gribble also had a keen eye for more restrained and evocative maritime scenes. His fellow member of the Poole and East Dorset Arts Society and Principal of the Poole School of Art, Percy Wise, claimed that ‘no one painted the sea so well’.

His seascapes and paintings of small or lone ships battling against the elements are often no less dramatic than the larger works but evoke very different emotions. Among his works in the museum are also delicate but incredibly atmospheric watercolours of fishermen working on Poole Quay and other scenes of day-to-day life in the harbour.

We believe this unfished portrait from between 1900 and 1904 is probably of Gribble’s wife, Eleanor. Unfortunately, we don’t know much about Nellie, as she was known, but she regularly appears in portraits and photographs by her husband and a later painting of ‘Mrs Gribble’ by Augustus John.

It was her generous bequest of more than 250 photographs, drawings, and paintings in 1963 that gave Poole Museum probably the best collection of her husband's works in the world.

Gribble was also well known for his portraits, many of his exhibits at the Royal Academy were portraiture, and he regularly painted people he must have known locally like Parkstone doctor Thomas Valentine Fitzpatrick, head of the Poole Rotary, Victor Hawkes, and this portrait of Poole’s mayor Herbert Carter.

His style was traditional, one dealer suggested that his portraits could be a bit flat and inexpressive unless he was inspired by his subject, but this particular painting was praised for hinting at ‘Carter’s kind and slightly playful nature emerging from the overpowering weight of civic office.’

Already a well-established artist by the time he and Nellie moved to Parkstone in the late 1920s or early 1930s Gribble was very involved in the Poole and East Dorset Society Art Society including serving as chairman. He was remembered as a sociable and successful member, still involved and active well into his 80s. Fellow artist Frank Dodman talked about going to a meeting at his house in the 1950s and seeing a large painting for the boardroom of a Clyde shipbuilders well underway.

For an artist in love with the sea and ships, Poole was the perfect base. Gribble would go on to paint scenes from all over Poole and up and down the South Coast until his death in 1962.

This painting of a Devonshire farm labourer is one of the most unusual of Gribble’s works, perhaps based on memories of Devon where his family came from. His style, honed at art school in Kensington and Belgium, largely stayed the same throughout his career even when surrounded by artists like Henry Lamb and Eustace Nash in Poole.

Here though we can see much more of an impressionist style, one that he occasionally hinted at in his portraits. We don’t know the date of the work so we can’t tell if it’s an early career experiment or him being influenced by his contemporaries in the Poole art scene!