Tour of the Baltic & Beyond: Watercolours 1904–5
This watercolour is one of a collection of works that we have for sale by a female traveller of some privilege at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Our artist seems to have been particularly interested in sea and river landscapes, choosing to travel by boat and preferring to depict views of—and often indeed from—the water.
This painting derives from a Baltic tour, at a time when the region was one of significant fascination, having in the earlier 19th century provided an uncharted alternative to the well-trodden Grand Tour routes of southern Europe. Developments in sea trade across the region in the 19th-century and the growth of cities such as Copenhagen, Stockholm, Tallinn and St Petersburg, newly attracted increasing numbers of travellers. The region's extensive waterways were at its heart, with impressive new constructions such as the Göta Canal, linking the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, providing access to the more remote locations. At the same time, the Baltic also fulfilled Romantic tastes for ideas of wilderness and mystery, and popular notions of celtic and norse revivalism.
These particular paintings follow the course of our artist's trip, leaving Blackwall Docks on the Thames on 27 August on the Union Castle Line Steamer 'Braemar Castle'. Her tour takes in Hamburg and Kiel in northern Germany, passes north to Denmark, taking in Vordingborg and Elsinore, then on across the lakes and waterways of Sweden's archipelagos, past Gothenburg and on to Stockholm. She returns home from Bremen in Germany on the steamship Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, arriving in Southampton on 28 September.
This was clearly a young woman of some means and accomplishment, whom it appears travelled with a female companion (see photograph, pictured for information only). Further paintings in the collection follow our artist's travels by water in Scotland, the Italian Lakes and on the French Cote d'Azur, where she frequents the luxurious villas of the Cap Martin.
