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The Corvette "Galathea" Lying to in order to Send Help to the Brig "St Jean"
C.W. Eckersberg (Danish, 1783–1853)
1839
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- height 63 cm, width 84 cm, height 76.4 cm, width 97.5 cm
- Culture
- Danish
- Museum
- SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
- Rights
- Public Domain Mark: SMK waives its rights in this photograph, as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
About this work
When leaving Danish waters on the corvette Galathea in the spring of 1839, Eckersberg saw – on 12 May – their companion, the brig St Jean, being accidentally rammed by a Finnish merchant vessel, sustaining such damage that its captain had to abandon the journey and seek safe harbour in Frederikshavn instead (Eckersberg, 2009, 825). Eckersberg depicted the accident that summer – although he did not show the actual collision, but instead the subsequent situation in which the Galathea assisted St Jean. In keeping with his artistic temperament, he avoided the drama to which the situation could so easily have lent itself. Instead, Eckersberg soberly recorded the ships’ positions in relation to each other during the rescue operation. Coolly observant, he recalls the impression made by the sunlit sky over the sea, entirely devoid of the Romantic atmosphere hovering over his early sunset landscape from Møn [cat.12].
