James H. Cafferty, American
“Shoot, I Can’t Remember. Is It ‘I Long For the Sight of Thy Fulsome Bosom’ or ‘I Long For the Sight of THINE Fulsome Bosom?,'” 1852
Oil on panel
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Info, and perhaps links to more info, about this artist can be found here (archived if necessary, actually “H.” is his middle initial), here, here (the exhibition catalogue raisonné book is pointed to here), and here (can be read in full for free on Fridays). He currently has no Wikipedia page in any language.
/// Who’s the handsome young man portrayed here?
Robert Fulton, the famed engineer.
People say that this dreamboat
invented the steamboat.
Well… he built one that worked, that part’s clear.
/// The inventor who gets all the credit
wasn’t always the first. There, I said it!
For each great invention,
some names get no mention
in history’s popular edit.
/// As is true in a lot of these tales,
there are errors in many details.
Things we’re sure that we know
turn out not to be so,
like the “Claremont,” that steamboat (with sails).
/// In its day no one called it that name.
“The North River” was how it gained fame.
When a book author wrote
the wrong name for that boat
it caught on. Fulton’s bio’s to blame.
/// But, before Clermont came on the scene,
Fulton worked on another machine.
He, for France, built a boat
he’d designed not to float—
Nautilus, the first real submarine.
/// Fulton’s actual undersea boat
inspired fiction— the novel Verne wrote.
And the Nautilus name
would take on yet more fame
in a nuclear sub (first of note).
/// Robert Fulton was big, but not burley
and so handsome that some thought him “girly.”
Years of working with steam
made his facial skin seem
like a child’s, and his hair full and curly.
/// “My man, Robert Fulton, is dreamy.
He writes that he can’t wait to see me.
With his poetic arts
he admires my ‘parts,’
and with Fulton, things always get steamy.”