The painting was almost certainly made in Antwerp. It is marked 1846 and similar paintings from Marseilles and New York I have never seen. It looks to me slightly like a “glass painting”, an art much practised by Carolus Ludovicus Weyts (1828 – 1876) in Antwerp and other members of his family. These pictures were painted on the “back side” of a ca 3 mm thick glass pane and you had to make them in a difficult backward way. You started with the hull and the thin black ropes in the rigging. The background with the clouds was put in as a last finish. There are no notations at the museum that comment on the artist only the year is mentioned, 1846.

I here send you a picture of full rigged ship “Minnet” that must have had approximately the same colors as the “Olof”. “Minnet” was portrayed in Antwerp in 1839. The hulls were at this time always black. The broad band on the “Olof” was probably light yellow like the one on the “Minnet”. I have also seen a picture of the barque “Charlotta Laetitia” from Gefle bulit in 1839 and painted by Petrus Weyts in Antwerp in 1841. He was the father of Carolus Ludovicus. And on his painting the broad band on “Charlotta Laetitia” is golden!

The rectangular flag at the stern of the “Olof” is the Swedish flag with the Norwegian one in its upper corner. Sweden and Norway were together in a union until 1905. I also enclose a picture of this flag.  The flag above this seems to have the number 2821, probably with black numerals. The stripes around the edges might be yellow and blue. These numbers I have tried to relate to some kind of register but so far without finding anything.  The triangular flag on the main mast probably carries the name OLOF but I can not read it. And neither can I be sure of the colors.  There are two flags on the foremost mast of the “Olof”. The upper one I think is white with a black trident. The lower one has probably a white diamond with a black trident while the rest of the flag, the background is light green. This isan old flag which I have seen on ships belonging to the firm H W Eckhoff & Co from Gefle, like the “Charlotta Laetitia”.

The artists in Antwerp had a habit of painting “double portraits”, at a greater distance they showed the same ship on a different tack! So the three-mast barque to the left of the stern of the “Olof” is indeed also “Olof”!  The ship was probably named Olof as an hommage to the father of Daniel Elfbrink who had died in 1835.  Mr Henricson wrote to a Elsa Thelin at a Menton address to inquire about the location of the OLOF painting but was unsuccessful.