On a Great Voyage

On 30 April 1857, the frigate “SMS Novara” set off from Trieste on the first and only circumnavigation of the globe by the Austrian Navy. In addition to a group of six “naturalists”, the Viennese Joseph Sellény (1824–1875) was also recruited as an expedition painter for the voyage, which was both scientific and, against the backdrop of colonialism, political. Sellény recorded his impressions in countless watercolor studies, some of which are now part of the Belvedere’s collection.

The ‘Novara Expedition’ (1857–1859) sailed via Rio de Janeiro around the Cape of Good Hope into the southern Indian Ocean and visited Saint Paul Island, from where it continued via Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Madras to Singapore. In Southeast Asia, Commodore Bernhard von Wüllerstorf-Urbair (1816–1883) set course for Java and Manila, then headed for Hong Kong and Shanghai, took the ship to the Pacific Solomon Islands and the Caroline Islands, and stopped off in Sydney and Auckland. For the return voyage, he had the eastward course continued via Tahiti in the middle of the southern Pacific, completed the voyage in Valparaíso, passed the Cape Horn test and stopped one last time in the Azores, until the ship moored again in Trieste on 26 August 1859––after covering around 51,000 nautical miles.

With his Ceylonese studies, Sellény attempts to capture an impression of space and a mood at the same time. He can hardly elaborate on the local population in the short time available, and so he restricts himself to fixing individual movements of their everyday activities. In the particularly successful “Palm Grove on Ceylon”––which is reflected more strongly in the water at the vanishing point and more restrainedly at the edge––the staffage figures, pointedly placed out of the foreground, are then only shadow creatures that lend additional depth to the pictorial space. Sellény had previously chosen a more detailed form of drawing for “The Island of St. Paul in the Indian Ocean”, although the dramatic circular movement from the overall view was abandoned in the later oil version. About half a century later, Otakar Nejedlý stayed in India and Ceylon, and in his “Memories of Another World”, the figures also remain rather shadowy.

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