“Ship portraiture” is a unique form of painting, modest in purpose but exacting in execution, long scorned by serious artists yet calling for particular knowledge and skills often beyond the ken of the fine artist. The specialty developed during a period when ships were growing mightily in size, complexity, speed, beauty, and grace. When the American sculptor Horatio Greenough first saw a clipper ship under full sail, he exclaimed, “There is something I would not be ashamed to show Phidias.”

The earliest American paintings of ships appear mostly as backgrounds for portraits of owners and masters or as amateur efforts. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, however, European artists specializing in ship pictures came to this country, and they soon acquired American-born students, protégés, and imitators. Thomas Birch left England for Philadelphia in 1794, Michel Corné arrived in Salem from Naples in 1799, the Scotsman Robert Salmon landed in Boston in 1828, and James Buttersworth arrived from England in 1850.

In 1871 Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen came from Denmark. These are unlikely given names for a Dane, but he was descended from a long line of violin makers, and Jacobsen was inflicted with the names at his christening in 1850 in honor of Antonio Stradivari, Nicolò Amati, and Gasparo Bertolotti da Salò. Young Jacobsen settled for Antonio. He was trained as a musician, becoming expert with violin, viola, and cello, but his greatest interest was always ships, sailors, and the sea. He spent most of his free time on the quays of Copenhagen, staring at sailing ships and steamers, asking questions, sketching and painting.

At twenty-one, fleeing conscription, he emigrated to America, where, after an audition, Leopold Damrosch hired him as a violinist for the New York Symphony. But Jacobsen evidently didn’t care for his colleagues. Most of them were German, and Denmark was not on cordial terms with Germany in those days. He soon quit and took to hanging around the Battery, where people looking for work during the 1870s often gathered. Prospective employers came to the park seeking maids, cooks, coachmen, or other servants. Young Jacobsen would amuse himself while waiting by sketching passing ships. One day a Marvin Safe Company executive noticed and liked his sketches. After a stint of painting bucolic scenes on safe doors, he caught the eye of an Old Dominion Steamship Company official. The man suggested he turn to painting ships, and young Jacobsen was launched on his lifelong career.

Success came quickly, and in 1880 he moved with his wife, Mary, to a large house in West Hoboken (later called Union City), New Jersey, with a block-square lawn and garden, looking across the Hudson toward Manhattan

Nervous and active, he rushed at everything he did, working from daylight till dusk. No one knows just how many pictures he turned out in his half-century of active work; certainly it was more than any other