Maritime Innovation in Miniature
Behind the Scenes at the National Maritime Museum, Stockholm
The National Maritime Museum in Stockholm, Sweden is one of the world’s greatest maritime museums, and it has one of the world’s greatest collections of ship models. It also houses a vast collection of drawings, weapons, uniforms, works of art–a huge miscellany of material culture relating to Sweden’s fascinating maritime past.
Over nearly a century, the Maritime Museum has collected approximately 50,000 objects that tell stories of maritime activities, both civilian and military, through the ages. The collections have enormous breadth and contain objects of every size–from entire icebreakers to works of art and brass buttons. The archives contain thousands of significant documents and include plans and drawings of a wide variety of ships and boats from numerous Swedish naval architects.
At the core of the museum’s collections are some of Europe’s finest ship models, dating from c.1600 onwards. Among these are unique models commissioned by the famous naval architect Fredrik Henrik af Chapman in the eighteenth century. These large-scale representations were built at the same time as the real vessels for educational purposes.
Unusually, the museum is in a purpose-built building designed in 1938 to house Sweden’s maritime and naval collections. The original maritime museum was in a small building in Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s ‘Old Town’, on an island connected by several bridges to the mainland, while a separate naval collection was displayed in a building overlooking the harbour. The new museum was conceived to unite these two collections. It was designed in a neo-classical style by Ragnar Östberg, one of Sweden’s most famous architects and maritime themes run through its construction from the door handles to the magnificent sailing ship laid in marble in the museum hallway.
Filming in the museum was a great pleasure as the fantastic curatorial team lent us the use of their purpose-built photography studio for two days and they worked tirelessly to prepare the models and move them into place for us to film.
Choosing which models to film was very difficult. On an initial scouting trip we explored the mighty Vasa, the seventeenth-century warship which sank on its maiden voyage and was rediscovered in the 1950s and raised in the 1980s. The maritime museum commissioned a fully rigged replica model of her to be made and it is now displayed alongside the actual warship in the museum; a very clever way of helping the audience conceive of the ship in its heyday–complete with painted sculptures and towering rigging. This would have made a fantastic model to film (and we hope to do so in the future!) but posed so many logistical challenges that we moved from the Vasa museum to the maritime museum to explore their astonishing collection.
Yet again, however, we were faced with numerous challenges. The museum’s ship model collection is not only large, but also many of the models themselves are huge. Some of the fully-rigged sailing ships stand well over seven feet high. They are also beautifully displayed in a contemporary gallery and moving them would be impossible. With the purpose-built photography studio in the basement available we therefore decided to film models that we could easily get to and from the studio.
We settled on four: The Argentina, 1930s diesel-driven cargo vessel; an un-named ‘votive’ ship model from the late Middle Ages that was once hung in Stockholm Cathedral; the Aeolus, an early twentieth-century steam passenger ship; and an un-named Swedish East Indiaman. These still posed significant and different logistical challenges, but with careful thought, careful planning, and careful carrying we succeeded in our plan and have given these four ships an entirely new lease of life and a new global audience.
They tell a variety of different stories, but all significant in their own way to global maritime history as well as the more specific maritime history of Sweden. The Argentina tells us of international maritime innovation, entrepreneurialism and the rapid rise of the South American economy; the votive ship models tells us about the role of faith in securing maritime safety before surveyors, engineers and maritime classification societies certified the safety of ships; the Aeolus tells us about the importance of local shipping networks to maritime nations such as Sweden; and the East Indiaman tells us of the role of European shipping companies in the establishment of a global economy and shared cultures.
One of the key things that makes Sweden’s National Maritime Museum stand out is that, ever since its opening in 1938, it has its own model-making workshop and a full-time modelmaker -Stefan Bruhn- on site. Stefan has not only personally cared for the historic models in the museum’s collection but also has personally built several models that are now part of the collection– including that great Vasa model. We were incredibly privileged to be able to explore the workshop and not only meet Stefan but also work with him on this project. We even give you a peak in Stefan’s workshop in our behind-the-scenes film.
The resulting films are spectacular, intriguing and inspiring, each one in a different way. We hope you all enjoy them and will be inspired to visit the maritime museum in Stockholm and the knowledgeable and friendly people who run it; it is a trip that is guaranteed to change the way that you think about Sweden and the Baltic World.
