Two More Restoration Projects On The Queen Mary: Join Us for Long Beach Gives 2026

The Queen Mary Heritage Foundation is excited to be participating in Long Beach Gives 2026. The event runs on September 24, with early giving open from September 17. Our goal: to raise funds to conserve two paintings on our agenda, we need to drum up $8,500 to do it.

What Long Beach Gives is

Long Beach Gives is a single-day giving event that puts hundreds of local nonprofits in front of local donors at once. Prize pools and matching funds ride on how many people give, not just how much, so a $25 gift on September 24 does more for a small organization than a $25 gift on any other day of the year.

We are a small organization. The Foundation is all-volunteer apart from one paid staff member, and every project we take on runs through the City of Long Beach, which owns the ship and its artwork.

The paintings in question aboard the RMS Queen Mary

When the ship first sailed in 1936, Cunard had commissioned original art for her public rooms from famed British painters of the day: Kenneth Shoesmith, Charles Pears, Dame Laura Knight. Much of that collection is still aboard.

In February, KC Restoration of Gardena evaluated six of those paintings and gave us a condition report on each. Four have been funded and are finished or underway:

• Madonna of the Atlantic, by Kenneth Shoesmith

• Madonna of the Tall Ships, by Kenneth Shoesmith

• The Mills Circus, by Dame Laura Knight

• Mauretania Arriving at Rosyth, by Charles Pears

Two paintings from our current fundraising drive remain.

Potential Queen Mary Restoration Project: Kenneth Shoesmith's Richard Hakluyt Recording the Voyages of the Elizabethan Sailors: $2,700

Kenneth Shoesmith, 1936, oil on canvas. The canvas is stable. The paint surface is not: ninety years of handling and cleaning have left small losses in the figures' clothing, along the left side of the globe, and across the maps at the bottom.

The conservator will in-paint those losses and document the work. $2,700 covers the whole treatment.

Potential Queen Mary Restoration Project: Kenneth Shoesmith's Flower Market: $5,800

Also Shoesmith, and the largest in the group. Flower Market is a marouflage, painted on canvas that was then glued directly to the wall. It has not pulled away, which is the good news.

It hangs in a public space and it shows. There are dozens of small paint losses. Dirt and debris have built up across the lower section. The frame has worked loose at the right side of the fireplace and is scuffed along its length.

The $5,800 pays for cleaning tests, cleaning the lower portion, in-painting the losses, and repairing and cleaning the frame.

How to use Long Beach Gives

Three ways to help, and only one of them costs you money.

1. You can give directly on our page at longbeachgives.org any time from September 17 onward, by card, and the gift posts to our thermometer immediately.

2. Before you check out, see whether your employer matches charitable gifts, plenty of Long Beach employers do, and a match form filed after the fact still doubles what your donation buys.

3. The third option is a peer fundraiser: from our page on longbeachgives.org, click the "Fundraise" button to create your own peer-to-peer page, give it a title, a goal, and a few sentences about why the Queen Mary's art matters to you, then send the link to friends and family. Everything raised there flows to the Foundation. If you'd rather not build the page yourself, email us and we'll set it up and hand you the link

one supporter who raises $500 from ten friends moves us further than most single gifts will. Fund both paintings and the gallery is finished, measured against a professional conservator's evaluation of every piece in the room.