# The Corvette "Galathea" Lying to in order to Send Help to the Brig "St Jean"

- By: C.W. Eckersberg (Danish, 1783–1853)
- Date: 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](https://open.smk.dk/artwork/image/KMS2011)
- Rights: [Public Domain Mark: SMK waives its rights in this photograph](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/)
- Picture: https://invisiblenetwork.ai/thumbs/smk/hd76s380d_KMS2011_crop.tif.jp2/full/!1920,1080/0/default.jpg
- Who can see it: Teens profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

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 \[cat.12\].