Zwei Walfanggemälde des 17. Jahrhunderts aus der Sammlung Hugo Bruhn im Deutschen Schiffahrtsmuseum

Abstract

In 2000, the German Maritime Museum was bequeathed with the whaling collection of Hugo Bruhn, a Hamburg transport entrepreneur (1936-1995). This article marks the start of a series of scholarly discussions of this remarkable collection, and covers two seventeenth-century whaling paintings. The first, a painting, oil on board, is signed "Stuhr." Three Hamburg painters of that name joined the local painters' guild in the 1680s and 1690s. There are significant similarities with another painting in the Museum for Hamburg History, unsigned, but likewise attributed to one Stuhr. Iconographic interrelationships between the two and an etching by Wichmann of 1683 are discussed and a common prototype for all three representations is postulated. The second painting, seemingly representing another seventeenth-century whaling scene and of good artistic quality, betrays some inconsistencies, on account of which the authors prefer to regard it as a work of the nineteenth or twentieth century, and recommend a forensic analysis.