Comments on: Jan Saenredam’s whale

By: John

John — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:17:53 +0000

Hi David. There are several engravings of stranded whales by different artists. Wikimedia Commons has one I linked to above by Jacob Matham which sounds like it might be your illustration. In any case it also features a man measuring the whale's prodigious organ.

By: David Eynon

David Eynon — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:52:29 +0000

Is this the first incident of this illustration? I have an etching which may be from a later period, with largely similar details, which was used in the Time-Life Books series “The Seafarers”. In doing the research I found later several variations of the same scene: composition and details almost identical, with variations for period styles.
In the version I have more activity is shown in detail (e.g. there are men taking the measure of the wale’s penis) and the composition is even more horizontal.

By: John

John — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:28:26 +0000

Hi Tony. That’s a decent site in any case, thanks for the link.

By: Tony C

Tony C — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 05:42:16 +0000

Earlier in the summer, at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, they had many of the prints that Melville outlines in “Of Monstrous Pictures of Whales” on exhibit. Don’t see them on this page (http://whalingmuseum.org/img/1957.7.1-newexhibit.jpg) but they might be buried on their blog somewhere.