American Folk Art Portrait of Marc Isambard Brunel British Inventor Engineer 19th Century

Early 19th century American portrait of Marc Isambard Brunel. Brunel was a well known British inventor and engineer. He is credited with engineering the Thames Tunnel. You can see the tunnel and some of his inventions displayed in the painting. Painted circa 1840. Oil on canvas. Signed lower right. Framed. After Samuel Drummond’s 1836 portrait of Brunel at the National Portrait Gallery London.

Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, (born April 25, 1769, Hacqueville, France—died December 12, 1849, London, England), French-émigré engineer and inventor who solved the historic problem of underwater tunneling.

In 1793, after six years in the French navy, Brunel returned to France, which was then in the midst of revolution. Within a few months his royalist sympathies compelled him to leave. He fled to the United States, where he held the post of chief engineer of New York City. He built many buildings, improved the defenses of the channel between Staten Island and Long Island, and constructed an arsenal and a cannon foundry. A design of his won the competition for the new Capitol to be built in Washington, D.C., but another design was used because of economic considerations

Brunel perfected a method for making ships’ blocks (pulleys) by mechanical means rather than by hand, and he sailed to England in 1799 to lay his plans before the British government. His plans were accepted, and he was placed in charge of installing his machines at Portsmouth dockyard. When completed, the system of 43 machines—run by 10 men—produced more blocks than 100 men could by hand, and the quality of these blocks was higher and more consistent. Production was much higher. The Portsmouth installation was one of the earliest examples of completely mechanized production.