Signed Antique Danish School Maritime Painting Oil on Board. Shows sailing ships in the foreground with a steamship in the far distance, and the iconic Kronborg Castle on the left. Kronborg, in the town of Helsingør, Denmark, was immortalized as Elsinore in Shakespeare's Hamlet, and remains one of the most important historical sites in the country. Signed indistinctly bottom left, possibly D. F. Johansen, and dated 1912. 

Overall Size: 16 1/8 x 22 1/4 in. 

Sight Size: 11 1/2 x 17 1/2 in. 

Frame Thicknes: 2 7/8 in. 

#4548  

Maritime art is a form of figurative art (painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture) that portrays or draws its main inspiration from the sea. Maritime painting is a particularly popular genre that originated thousands of years ago but reached its zenith starting in the 17th Century during the Danish Golden Age. In practice the art usually depicts shipping on rivers and estuaries, beach scenes and all art showing boats, without any rigid distinction, and can be drawn or painted from dry land or out in the open ocean. Strictly speaking “maritime art” should always include some element of human seafaring, whereas “marine art” is its own genre, showing seascapes with no human element. With the rise of Romantic art, the sea and the coast was reclaimed from the Dutch specialists by many landscape painters, and works including no vessels became common for the first time. The British especially dominated the genre, once Willem Van de Velde the Elder and his son (the Younger) moved from Holland to England to work for King Charles II. Major British artists who specialized in marine and maritime images, especially during the 19th Century, include William Anderson, Robert Cleveley, George Chambers, and Philip de Loutherbourg. The conventions of the Dutch masters remained quite common in maritime art, although there have been outliers in the style as Impressionism, Expressionism, and Surrealism appeared in the late 19th through mid 20th Centuries.