Tarn wrote: “I beleive Ken Marshall painted the painting in Titanic's Smoking room in the James Cameron Titanic movie.”
Ken was originally asked to do the painting, but because of his time constraints while wearing his many hats while working on the movie, someone else had to do it. The problem was that Cameron was unhappy with the painting as it turned out; so Ken agreed to go over portions of it and fix it. Ken got so carried away with putting in detail and reworking what the other artist had done that most of the painting that appeared in the movie was Ken’s work and not the work of the original artist.
By the way, a condition that was put on Cameron if he wanted to reproduce the “Plymouth Harbour” painting for the movie was that the copy painting had to be destroyed after production ended.
And then Tarn said: “Here is a mystery, and I think Ken Marshall might have mentioned this possibility- At the top of each grand staircase landing (B deck,C deck,D deck), rather than there being a clock fixed in the wall, there was an intricate painting of some kind.”
The oil paintings you mentioned were actually at the half landing of each staircase. They were vertical landscapes surrounded by a heavily carved oak moulding. The “half-landing” paintings and the moulding survive at the old Crown Berger paint factory in Northern England. A number of them were pictured in a past issue of the Commutator (from about 1989), but I don’t know the issue number off hand. At each deck level on the aft bulkhead, facing the staircase, were brass letters giving the name of the deck and perhaps a clock. Keep in mind that Cameron’s sets were not entirely accurate in this regard.
Daniel wrote: “There was a painting at the D deck landing….”
Do you mean at the half landing between “C” and “D” decks, or at the “D” Deck level (against the funnel hatch), facing the staircase? If you mean facing the staircase, Olympic had a tapestry here, and I believe this was probably a tapestry on Titanic as well and not a painting.
Eric Sauder