"Inmitten des leviathanischen Lebens ...": eine Walfangzeichnung von Durand-Brager aus der Sammlung Bruhn im Deutschen Schiffahrtsmuseum

Abstract

Before the advent of modern whaling in the 1860s, few professional, academically trained artists had the opportunity to witness whaling operations themselves. Jean-Baptiste-Henri Durand-Brager (1814-79) is one of them. Besides pursuing a maritime career he was schooled by renowned French marine painters. This article presents the entire whaling-related oeuvre by Durand-Brager hitherto known, viz. three lithographs, one drawing and one oil painting, all produced in the years 1844 and 1845. In the Bruhn Whaling Collection in the German Maritime Museum is a remarkable crayon and charcoal drawing by this artist, signed and dated 1844. It shows a whaling ship with the carcass of a right whale alongside, while cutting-in operations are about to begin and a whaling boat in the foreground is waiting for another whale to resurface. A long sea swell and an approaching rain front impart an atmosphere of terse action set on a vast ocean. The drawing is correct in every detail, be it the representation of ship handling, ship architecture, rigging, whale anatomy, the seascape and the weather. Durand-Brager created a very similar version of this scene which was the basis for a lithograph published in 1844 or 1845. This is a print which Herman Melville, the author of Moby- Dick, who himself had gathered extensive whaling experience in 1841-1843, commended above all other prints of whaling available at his time for its painstakingly correct representation of whaling as he had witnessed it. A second, matching print by Durand-Brager of whale ships in a calm in a tropical roadstead received similar praise by Melville. The article further presents an oil painting that varies the whaling scene, and finally a lithograph of whalers after the end of the whaling season in the roadstead off a high cliff. In both the oil painting and the third lithograph a critical viewer familiar with historical whaling practise, naval architecture and ship handling finds a few details which seem slightly inconsistent with current knowledge of historical practise in both whaling and ships’ architecture. But given the extreme accuracy displayed in other works of Durand-Barger’s whaling art, which corresponds exactly to what is known from other contemporary sources, one may do well to interpret these unusual details provisionally as hypothetical findings, which may in due course be corroborated by other sources.