01 Classic Works of Art, Marine Paintings - With Footnotes, #125

Laurits Bernhard Holst, Danish 1848-1934

Shipping off Gibraltar, c. 1876

Oil on canvas

42.8x70cm

Private collection

Gibraltar is a British Overseas Territory located at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula. It is bordered to the north by Spain. In 1704, Anglo-Dutch forces captured Gibraltar from Spain during the War of the Spanish Succession on behalf of the Habsburg claim to the Spanish throne. The territory was ceded to Great Britain in perpetuity under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. More on Gibraltar 

Laurits Bernhard Holst, Danish 1848-1934 was born in the small fishing village of Borgense in Denmark. He was the son and pupil of Niels Peter H. Holst and studied at the Copenhagen Academy until the age of twenty when he sailed to New York to travel in North America and Mexico. He lived a year in Chicago before returning to Denmark in 1870. In 1873 he moved to England and lived in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, for five years, before returning to Denmark. In 1883 he moved to London to be at the centre of the Victorian art world, and from 1892 he occupied Herkomer's old studio in Chelsea. Finally in 1896 Holst settled in Bournemouth, Dorset, where he lived until his death in 1934.


Holst was almost exclusively a marine painter, treating his chosen subject in such diverse locations as Denmark, Norway, England, the Côte d'Azur, Gibraltar and the Nile at Cairo. The variety of locations allowed him to represent the sea in a broad range of temporal and atmospheric conditions, ranging from the ice-locked seas of Denmark and Norway to the sun drenched warm waters of the Mediterranean basin. As Edgcumbe Stanley observed of Holst in The Studio of 1903: "he seizes the momentary movement of the sea, that mysterious poetry of the ocean and fixes it without effort." More on Laurits Bernhard Holst

Please visit my other blogs: Art Collector, Mythology, Marine Art, Portrait of a Lady, The Orientalist, and The Canals of Venice

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