Much as once a week I like to take time off to cover warships (Wednesdays), on Sunday, I like to cover military art and the painters, illustrators, sculptors, and the like that produced them.
Combat Gallery Sunday : The Martial Art of Eugene Voishvillo
Eugene Valerianovich Voishvillo was born in Libau (now Liepāja, Latvia) in the Holy Russian Empire in 1907. The son of a naval engineer in the Tsar’s Navy, he had a love of the sea and saw the fleet everyday as a child. In 1927 he obtained entrance to the highly competitive Academy of Fine Arts (which accepted only 40 candidates out of hundreds of applicants each year) but after just a year there, he left to join the Soviet Navy. Training as a seaplane mechanic, he left the fleet in 1930 and took a job at a child’s toy factory in Leningrad, where he created concept drawings and toy illustrations.
When war came in 1941, he was recalled to the Navy as a Marine in a coastal artillery unit, even though he was a 34-year-old father. However he soon was given a job at the fleet newspaper Za Sovetskuyu Rodinu (For the Soviet Motherland), commonly just referred to as ZSR, after his skills with a pencil were noticed.
As the war progressed, he was a senior draftsman and helped illustrate maps and charts as well as texts for the Voroshilov Naval Academy.
Demobilized in 1948, he transitioned into drawing and painting for a number of Warsaw Pact nautical and shipbuilding publications as a member of the Union of Artists, producing more than 150 circulated prints of various warships and sailing vessels.
The Santa Maria
The German Navy Schulschiff Deutschland
The Donald McKay shipyard, East Boston built clipper Lightning. She made the New York to Liverpool run in 13 days, 19½ hours, all under sail and was known to break 19 knots, outrunning many steamships of the time.
He gained an unofficial fan club as across the Soviet Union people cut out his drawings and decorated their walls and after a time most nautical schools, club and ship-modeling groups soon had his art as standard decor. He had a flavor for ships involved in polar exploration and I have used his paintings in several Warship Wednesdays (such as on the St. Anne and the Yermak)
The 1,500 ton training barque Tovarish (formerly Kreigsmarine’s Gorch Fock)
Steamship Savannah
Nuclear icebreaker Lenin meets the elderly Yermak
Peter The Great’s first Russian Naval ship
His magnum opus was a series of 60 paintings of historical oceanography ships (primarily Russian) for the World Ocean Museum in Kaliningrad during the 1980s and early 1990s many of which were used for stamps, seals, and posters not only in Soviet Bloc countries but worldwide.
Baron Toll’s ill-fated 450-ton steam- and sail-powered brig Zarya on the 1900-1902 Russian Polar Expedition
Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram
The Danish-built ice strengthened steamship SS Chelyuskin, built in 1933 for an attempt by the Soviets to run through the Northeast passage from Europe to Asia, she had to be abandoned in the ice in 1934.
Lt. Georgy Sedov on his doomed ship the St Foka
HMS Beagle of Darwin fame
The 1,500-ton German Reichsmarine colonial gunboat turned survey ship Meteor, who survived both World Wars only to end up in the Soviet Navy until 1968
The German Imperial corvette Gazelle on China Station
Capt.Cook’s HMS Endeavor
HMS Discovery on the British Arctic Expedition of 1875–1876
He died in 1993 in Latvia after living through the Tsar, Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, two world wars, a revolution, civil war and the like, all with an upbeat outlook on life. As long as he had a canvas or piece of paper and a ship to draw or paint, he was satisfied.
When speaking about his paintings, he said, “”And yet I have lived a happy life. I painted what I loved.”
In 2009, the immense 376-foot long Russian training bark Kruzenshtern took 15 of his paintings on a world-wide cruise. The World Ocean Museum has 83 paintings and 74 other illustrations by Voishvillo on display.
Thank you for your work, sir.
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