By Louis Letouche
Located in Cirencester, Gloucestershire
Sagres II, 1937
by Louis Letouche (French 1924-2015)
oil painting on linen canvas, stretched over board
framed
Framed size: 18.25 x 13.75 inches
Superb oil painting by the well listed French marine artist Louis Letouche (1924-2015). The painting portrays a Portugese Ship from the early 20th Century, titled: Sagres II.
The three-masted ship was launched under the name Albert Leo Schlageter on 30 October 1937 at Blohm & Voss in Hamburg for Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine. The ship was named after Albert Leo Schlageter, who was executed in 1923 by French forces occupying the Ruhr area. Her first commander was Bernhard Rogge. Sagres is a sister ship of the Gorch Fock, the Horst Wessel, and the Romanian training vessel Mircea. Another sister, Herbert Norkus, was not completed, while Gorch Fock II was built in 1958 by the Germans to replace the ships lost after the war.
Following a number of international training voyages, the ship was used as a stationary office ship after the outbreak of World War II and was only put into ocean-going service again in 1944 in the Baltic Sea. On 14 November 1944 she hit a Soviet mine off Sassnitz and had to be towed to port in Swinemünde. Eventually transferred to Flensburg, she was taken over there by the Allies when the war ended and finally confiscated by the United States.
In 1948, the U.S. sold her to Brazil for a symbolic price of $5,000 USD.She was towed to Rio de Janeiro where she sailed as a school ship for the Brazilian Navy under the name Guanabara. In 1961, Ambassador Teotónio Pereira of Portugal, who was also a man of the sea...
Category
Realist 1990s Art