Screw Steamship Willkommen, 1895

Details

Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen (1850-1921)
Screw Steamship Willkommen, 1895
signed and dated A. JACOBSEN 1895 lower left
oil on canvas
21 ¾ x 35 ¾ in.

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Lot Essay

Built in 1887, the screw steamship Willkommen was a German oil tanker owned by the Deutsch-American Petroleum Company (for an unsigned version of the same vessel, see Harold S. Sniffen, Antonio Jacobsen - The Checklist: Addenda List Number 2 (Newport News, 1994), no. 18, pp. 76-77). With ties to his grandfather's company and the source of the Rockefeller family's fortune, this work may have been of personal interest to David Rockefeller. In 1913, the Gut Heil, a tanker en route to the Standard Oil refinery, collided with the Wilkommen off the coast of Louisiana and despite the assistance of several Standard Oil vessels, lost 5,000 gallons of oil (G. H. Williams, The United States Merchant Marine in World War I: Ships, Crews, Shipbuilders and Operators, Jefferson, North Carolina, 2017, pp. 368-369).

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