Into the Blue Yonder with Sigyn

Sometimes a year takes on an unintentional theme and this one for me has been maritime paintings which started earlier this year with a visit to the National Maritime Museum's stunning exhibition "Turner and the Sea" and may have ended with the most recent trip to a smaller but interesting Harris Museum's current exhibition "Making Waves" so contrariwise I'm about to go on holiday nowhere near the sea. 

The ship with full sails speeding through the waves is the Sigyn built  in Göteborg (1887) and one of the last sailing barques built for worldwide trade before steam took over (Wikipedia ship history here)  Considered fast and beautiful the Sigyn is now a museum ship moored in Turku on the south west coast of Finland.

The artist is Håkan Sjöström,, born in 1937 many years after this ship first set sail but he would have lots of opportunities to study the Sigyn as he worked at a shipyard in Turku until his retirement and is considered the foremost marine painter in Scandinavia.  He has painted ships from many eras and also produced paintings for Åland Post's six year series on passenger ferries which concluded earlier this year.  Appropriately one of the last stamps included a ship built  by a Turku shipbuilder, the STX-shipyard (FDC here).  Not as romantic as a sailing ship but to arrive by sea is always a wonderful way to arrive in a place or country.