While a rather subdued Fritz Melbye painting of the Cruz Bay Battery and its environs was well-known to many historians interested in St. John, as well as the art world, a slightly different version of the same picture with significantly brighter colors recently came to light.
A sharp-eyed historian alerted St. John resident Eleanor Gibney to its existence, and Gibney recently posted it on the St. John Historical Society Facebook page.
“I really thought it was interesting that there were two versions. This is like the Technicolor version,” she said.
Gibney said it is only one of five known paintings done before the 1917 transfer of what was then called the Danish West Indies to the United States.
In addition to the color, there are other differences that include positions of the bushes and the amount of Cruz Bay Creek that’s visible. Gibney likened it to the children’s game where you find what’s different between two pictures.
Both pictures are clearly identifiable as the Battery with St. Thomas in the distance. Gibney said she thinks Melbye was painting from a spot that would now be near the back end of the Lumberyard shopping complex parking lot.
A close looks shows the stairs that sit on the left side of the Battery’s main building that’s home to the conference room. The building on the left side of the painting now houses the administrator’s office. Gibney said, when she was a child in the 1960s, that building served as the post office.
She thinks it was painted in the spring or fall based on the position of the sun.
The picture, painted in 1851, was offered for auction at Bruun Rassmussen, a Copenhagen auction house. Gibney said it didn’t meet the reserve of somewhere around $40,000 so was withdrawn. It is not currently listed on its website.
Melbye was a Danish painter. Gibney said his protégé was the St. Thomas-born Camille Pissaro, who traveled with Melbye and eventually moved to Paris.
According to Gibney, Melbye had a commission to paint pictures of all three Virgin Islands that were made into lithographs for a Danish book on its overseas territories.
“It was like a coffee table book,” she said.
She said the more subdued version, along with a painting with a view of Ajax Peak along the North Shore to America Hill, sold a couple of years ago as a pair for $60,000 at Christie’s auction house.
Melbye and his two brothers, Anton and Vilhelm, were well-known marine painters.
For more on the painting and the Historical Society, visit https://www.facebook.com/StJohnHistoricalSociety .