Sea Legends – Sailor’s Yarn

Since time immemorial, the fascination of seafaring has also been fed by its adventurous stories, the ‘sea legends’ about the ship’s kobold, all kinds of sea monsters, giant octopuses, water sprites and mermaids, ghost ships such as the “Flying Dutchman” or the disappearance of entire sea and even air fleets in the Bermuda Triangle. “Real seafarers” spin their finer ‘sailor’s yarn’ from equally impressive but hardly less dubious accounts of experiences on the border between truth and fantasy.

The new interpretations of the fairy tale "Von den Fischer un siine fru" (On the Fisherman and His Wife), once collected by Philipp Otto Runge, who passed it on to the Brothers Grimm via the writer and publisher Achim von Arnim (1781–1831), are contemporary responses to 11 September and the great stock market hype of 2001. The fisherman, who gives freedom to a fished magical turbot––an enchanted prince––is repeatedly urged by his wife Ilsebill, who in the end fails because of her hubris, to have wishes granted in return: “Manntje, Manntje, Timpe Te, / Buttje, Buttje inne See, / myne Fru de Ilsebill / will nich so, as ik wol will” (Little man, little man, little tip, / little halibut, little halibut in the sea, / my wife, the Ilsebill / does not want as I well will).

In “Géricault”, Alois Mosbacher puts himself as a dog with his back to the action in the place of an icon of French painting––a “disguised self-portrait” (according to Martin Warnke). “The Raft of the Medusa” by the Romantic painter Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), now in the Louvre, originally reminiscent of a historical eyesore in the context of the Napoleonic Wars, has undergone an unprecedented reinterpretation over the years as a masterpiece of national identity for the Grande Nation. The real-life account is “Watson and the Shark”; here, a print after the painting of the same name by John Singleton Copley (1737/38–1815) is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The painting was commissioned by Brook Watson (1735–1807), who was Lord Mayor of London for a year in 1796 and later headed the Bank of England. In the harbor of Havana (Cuba), Watson had lost his lower right leg as a 13-year-old shipboy in a shark attack.

• RDF
• XML
• JSON

IIIF