Beschreibung:

A fine fully planked and rigged dockyard style model of the 36 gun fith rate 'Iris' of circa 1783 built by J.M. Brown with bound masts, yards with stun's'l booms, foot ropes, standing and running rigging with scale blocks and full suit of stitched linen sails with rope bindings and deck details including carved male figurehead, hair rails, anchors with bound wooden stocks and float, catheads, belaying rails and pins, gratings, stove pipe, bell with canopy over, companionways, bilge pumps, capstan, double ship's wheel, upper and main deck guns in carriages with tackle and carvel planked and framed ship's boat with bottom boards, thwarts and oars. The hull, unplanked to the waterline and with partially planked decks is finished in natural wood and black with glazed stern and quarter windows with carved and gilded decoration and mounted on two turned wood columns -- 40 x 52in. (101.5 x 132cm.) . Stand H.M.S. Iris , a fifth rate mounting 32/36 guns, was laid down in 1782 and launched from Barnard's yard at Deptford on 2 May 1783. Measured by her builder at 677 tons, she was 126 feet in length with a 35 foot beam, and carried a crew of 220 men. Her wartime career was noteworthy in that her action with the French privateer Citoyenne Francais on 13 May 1793 was the first engagement of the Revolutionary Wars following the formal declaration of hostilities on 1 February that year. Apart from being loaned to Trinity House from 1803-05, she remained on active service until being made Receiving Ship at Yarmouth and was subsequently renamed Solebay in 1809 after the loss of her sister H.M.S. Solebay off the coast of Africa that July. Hulked in 1811, she was used as a training ship for boys of the Marine Society from 1815 and was eventually broken up at Devonport in 1833.