The Russian Ship of the Line "Asow" and a Frigate at Anchor in the Roads of Elsinore

Eckersberg is often called the father of Danish painting, and he was fanatical about getting ships right. For this canvas he borrowed technical drawings from the naval dockyard and studied the Russian ship of the line at close range, noting the work in his diary. The scene itself, though, is a construction. He had inspected the vessels at Copenhagen, then in the painting moved them up the coast to the roads off Elsinore. A Russian squadron in Danish waters in 1828 was nothing unusual, since the Baltic fleets were forever threading the narrow Sound past the customs house. Behind the anchored ships rise the towers of Kronborg, the fortress Shakespeare had already turned into the Elsinore of Hamlet more than two centuries before.