By Kirsty Gilchrist

In this oil on canvas painting, John Bellany uses bright, expressive colours throughout, depicting the Dawn Pearl low down in Port Seton harbour. The fishing vessel was built at J & G Forbes, Sandhaven, Fraserburgh, in 1982 under the name Goodway, and was registered as Dawn Pearl from 1989. The Dawn Pearl’s current status is unknown as its fishing registry was cancelled when acquired by German owners in 2008.

This painting was completed in 2006 and can be shown in stark contrast to some of Bellany’s earlier work, highlighting the artist’s varied portfolio.

John Bellany CBE, HRSA, RA, LLD (1942 – 2013) was a Scottish artist renowned for his maritime themed work focused on fishermen and harbour scenes of his hometown Port Seton. Born into a family of fishermen and boatbuilders, Bellany was raised in a small, close-knit community, where vessels like the Dawn Pearl were used for fishing crabs and lobsters around the east coast of Scotland.

This painting of the Dawn Pearl was sold for £10,000 at a charity auction in 2006. The event was hosted by the Provost of Glasgow in aid of the Hikkaduwa Area Relief Fund, which was established to assist Sri Lankan communities devastated by the 2004 tsunami. Bellany was moved to donate this painting in solidarity with the small fishing villages that were destroyed. At the auction, the work raised a significant part of the funds required to provide a new community centre and outdoor theatre for the village of Dodanduwa.

Bellany attended Edinburgh College of Art from 1960 – 1965 and studied under Sir Robin Philipson, where social realism and his own ancestry greatly influenced his early work. His body of work includes the painting ‘The Boat Builders’, which is also held in the Scottish Maritime Museum collection. This large composition spans almost five metres and is a nod to one of his artistic heroes, Fernand Léger, the French painter who developed his own form of cubism, “tubism”.

An honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy, Bellany’s painting ‘Dawn Pearl’ is currently on display at the Scottish Maritime Museum as part of the collaborative exhibition ‘Tides of Time’. The exhibition explores Scotland’s maritime heritage through the artwork of RSA associated artists and will be running until the end of April 2026.

Thank you to Stuart Murphy who compiled research about John Bellany for this blog post during his time volunteering at the Scottish Maritime Museum.