British clippers were fast-sailing ships built for the China tea trade. They carried a lot of sail and were generally very long, making them powerful and fast through the water, to compete with steamers which could not carry enough coal to make non-stop passages to China. Faster passages meant better prices for cargo, and the clippers' competitive edge in the China trade was lost in 1869 when the Suez Canal shortcut was opened, but clippers going the long way around the Horn of Africa continued to beat steamers over the longer route to Australia. Sailing Vessel Cromdale was the last clipper built for the Australian wool trade, in Glasgow in 1891, 'one of the loveliest of the steel ships with double topgallant sails and main skysails' (description, State Library of South Australia). She sailed until 1913 when, bound for Fowey in Cornwall with a cargo of guano from Taltal in Chile, she ran aground and was badly holed in thick fog at Bass Point off the Lizard, Cornwall. There were no casualties, for she was so close to the land when she struck in calm seas that her crew could step off the bowsprit straight onto the rocks. Within one week, the vessel had broken up.

Pears was, like most great marine painters, a sailor, preferably single-handed. First he sailed from the lower Thames, near Canvey Island. He lived in Chiswick at the turn of the 20th century, and eventually moved to Cornwall for a life afloat. He owned several yachts over his lifetime, and wrote several books about sailing. His career coincided with the rise of the lithographic poster, which proliferated between 1880 and the First World War to the point where there was hardly a wall in any city that did not have an advertising poster stuck to it. Pears's way of painting evolved to suit the medium, with simple subjects, broad flat colours and luminous light effects. What he lost in subtlety he gained in strength of design, and thus he became one of Britain's great poster artists. Unusually, he was able to translate this success into the world of fine art, becoming an Official War Artist for the Admiralty and a highly successful exhibiting painter in London. This painting of the stately Cromdale in full sail by moonlight, slipping past the cliffs of Dover, was exhibited in 1934, the year after he married his second wife, the redoubtable and independent sailing journalist Dulce 'Peter' Gerard.