Whale tale: a Dutch seascape and its lost Leviathan

[Palinurus]

Source: _http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2014/06/video_dead_whale_appears_on_sc.php

Video: Dead whale appears on Scheveningen beach painting

Thursday 05 June 2014

Restorers working on a Golden Age painting of the beach at Scheveningen by Dutch master Hendrick van Anthonissen have made a startling discovery.

The original work featured a dead whale which had been painted over at a later date.

It had always been a bit of a puzzle what the people standing on the beach were actually looking at. But when the painting, which has been owned by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge for 140 years, was cleaned, the mystery started to become clear.

Conservator Shan Kuang first uncovered a man standing in mid air. Then gradually the hump of the whale appeared.

The whale appears to have been painted over in the 18th century, perhaps because a dealer thought it would sell better without the dead whale.

‘Today we treat works of art as entities, but in the previous centuries paintings were often elements of interior design that were adapted to fit certain spaces – or adjusted to suit changing tastes,’ Kuang said.

© DutchNews.nl

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Published on June 4, 2014

Earlier this year a conservator at the Hamilton Kerr Institute made a surprising discovery while working on a painting owned by the Fitzwilliam Museum. As Shan Kuang removed the old varnish from the surface, she revealed the whale that had been the intended focus of the scene.

In 1873 the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, was given a number of Dutch landscape paintings by a benefactor called Richard Kerrick. Among these works of art was a beach scene painted by the artist Hendrick van Anthonissen early in the 17th century. Anthonissen depicts groups of people clustered on a sandy beach at the small town of Scheveningen. Other figures stand on the cliffs and, on the shore, several boats have been pulled up on the sand.

_http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/whale-tale-a-dutch-seascape-and-its-lost-leviathan

The same story in the version of the Guardian with additional hyperlinks and illustrations embedded, including the same vidclip:

Restoration reveals hidden whale in 17th-century Dutch painting

Mysterious artwork at Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum showing people clustered on beach had huge creature painted over

Maev Kennedy
theguardian.com, Wednesday 4 June 2014 10.07 BST

It was always a bit of a puzzle what the people clustered on the sands, or peering down from the dunes, were actually looking at on a bleak stretch of windswept Dutch beach. The startling truth has just been revealed, after the conservator Shan Kuang took a delicate scalpel to a painting which has been in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge for the past 140 years.

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