The naval paintings of Commodore Hans Peter Holm (1847-1929), a member of an illustrious Danish naval family, are discussed, as are the service biographies of his father, who commanded the frigate JYLLAND at the Battle of Helgoland in 1864, and of his grandfather, who commanded the Danish-Norwegian naval frigate NAJADEN at the Battle of Lyngor on July 6, 1812.

af Eric Nielsen

The four paintings of Danish naval ships reproduced and discussed in this article were recently discovered to be in the possession of a Danish-American descendant of the artist, Commodore Hans Peter Holm (1847-1929) of the Danish navy.

The incredibly unique story of the Holm family of Danish naval officers, going back to at least the life of Hans Andersen of 1698-1754, makes this story of Commodore Holm’s naval paintings doubly fascinating. What is so incredibly unique about the Holm naval family to which Commodore Holm belonged is that not only did his father command the famous Danish steam frigate JYLLAND in the Battle of Helgoland in 1864, but his grandfather commanded the Danish-Norwegian frigate NAJADEN in the equally famous Battle of Lyngor in 1812.

To gain perspective of the utterly unique place of the Holm naval officers in these two particular naval battles at Helgoland and Lyngor, one needs to know that between the end of the Great Nordic War in 1719, till today, Danish warships participated in only three major naval engagements with enemy warships, i.e., at the Battles of Helgoland and Lygor, and when the Danish-Norwegian battleship PRINS CHRISTIAN FREDERIK was destroyed in action in 1808 by a British naval force that included two British battleships. Thus, naval officers from the Holm family commanded the key Danish warship in two of these final three major naval engagements in Danish naval history that involved combat with other enemy warships.

When Hans Peter Holm painted the four paintings that are reproduced and discussed here, he undoubtedly knew of the major historic roles his father and grandfather played in these two rare Danish naval battles in this latter period of Danish naval history when Denmark was actively pursuing a policy of neutrality rather than aggressive warfare.

It is a premise of this article that Holm’s knowledge of the unique family role of his father and grandfather in, for Commodore Holm, Denmark’s recent naval history, must have exercised a powerful influence on Holm’s motives in choosing and depicting the subject matter of the paintings discussed in this article.

Hans Peter Holm is referred to in this article by the final naval rank he achieved in Danish naval service, Commodore. He was promoted to this rank in 1897, after an entire life in Danish naval service, starting with his inception as a naval cadet when he was only 14 years old.

In some navies “commodore” is sometimes used as a courtesy title rather than as a formal rank, but in other navies commodore is an actual officer rank, indicating an officer below the rank of rear admiral, who commands a squadron, division, or some other detachment of naval ships. However, it is not believed, from his service biography, that Hans Peter Holm ever commanded more than one ship at a time during his Danish naval service. Apparently, in the Danish navy at the time, Commodore simply signified an intermediary rank between Captain and Rear Admiral, without significance as to special duties.

While Commodore Holm may have painted as a hobby and a form of relaxation, and as a means of creative self-expression, at least three of the four Holm paintings discussed here manifest a very serious and definite purpose in their compositional process. That apparent purpose was to symbolize and commemorate his father’s and his grandfather’s life and career in Danish naval service and the influence of their example, and to acknowledge his own resulting commitment to a career in Danish naval service.

This article’s author gained the impression that when Commodore Holm produced at least three of the four paintings discussed here, Holm was not making a general statement to others, but personal statements to himself, which contained symbolism of his family’s historic past.

The fourth Holm painting, of the Danish cruiser FYEN, is a somewhat odd composition that poses a mystery as to what this painting might actually represent, unless this painting is no more than a simple portrait of one of the most attractive Danish warships of her day, a painting without any symbolic significance. However, because of the personal symbolism apparently embodied in Holm’s other three paintings, this may be a doubtful proposition.

One primary subject of these paintings is Danish naval ships during the age of sail – all of Commodore Holm’s paintings pertain to ship-rigged Danish naval vessels. Although Commodore Holm served in the Danish navy during its historical transition from sail to steam, and although Commodore Holm himself commanded several of the Danish navy’s iron-built, steam-powered warships, and one of its first steel-hulled warships, the VALKRIEN, Commodore Holm was obviously attracted to the romance of sailing ships, with their towering masts and maze of rigging.

Although Commodore Holm does not appear to be a professionally-trained marine artist, his paintings are artistically and historically compelling for that very reason. These paintings are charming expressions of a sea officer’s service life. They are also an unusual blend of family documents and heirlooms, and also historical-artistic documents of an expressive officer who loved ships and the sea, and Danish naval service as well as his forefathers’ historic participation in that service.

Holm’s naval paintings are also valuable and unique documents because of their special “provenance,” i.e., their derivation, and therefore their association, not only with Commodore Hans Peter Holm himself as the artist and as a Danish naval officer, but also because Commodore Holm came from an illustrious Danish naval family.

Commodore Holm’s father, and his father’s father – i.e., Captain Hans Peter Holm (1772-1812), who was Commodore Hans Peter Holm’s namesake – both served as officers in the Danish navy, as did Commodore Holm’s great grandfather, Peder Holm (1725-1786), a naval Captain, and his great, great grandfather, Hans Anderson (1698-1754), who served as a naval lieutenant. This long Holm family heritage of serving as naval officers in the Danish navy during the glory days of the age of sail probably influenced Hans Peter Holm’s choice of Danish naval sailing ships as the subject matter of his paintings.

Commodore Holm’s father, the Danish naval Captain Peter Christian Holm, achieved historical notoriety when he commanded the famous Danish naval frigate JYLLAND at the Battle of Helgoland on May 9, 1864, against an Austrian-Prussian naval force which was seeking to break the Danish blockade of Germany’s seaports. This battle was the last action ever fought between ship-rigged naval ships operating in squadron formation.

The Battle of Helgoland is a celebrated one in Danish naval history, because this Danish victory was not only a tremendous morale booster, at the time it was fought, to the morale of the Danish people whose little country was facing the specter of obvious defeat in the “German” war of 1864, it is also a historical bright spot during that disastrous war for Denmark, when the home team won a rare and isolated victory for Denmark.

During the Battle of Helgoland, the major combatants on either side were wooden-hulled frigates equipped with relatively rudimentary steam engines which drove an underwater screw propeller – hence the generic term “screw frigates.” However, these screw-frigates were also square-rigged ships equipped with a full outfit of sails, and aside for the amidship funnel for the frigate’s steam engine, had every outward appearance of being a traditional sailing ship.

In fact, during the Battle of Helgoland, none of the steam powered ships on either side had their sails set, having furled all sails to avoid the risk of fire from action damage, a common precaution in naval combat during the age of sail, when vessel’s lower courses were furled – the condition of “fighting sail” – to avoid damage from flat trajectory cannon fire. Indeed, at the Battle of Helgoland, the Austrian flagship’s rigging did in fact catch fire from the Danish warships’ cannonading – principally, the fire from the JYLLAND, which was equipped with the greatest number of rifled cannon of the warships in the Danish squadron.

Captain Peter Christian Holm’s command, the JYLLAND, was the most heavily engaged of the three Danish warships comprising the Danish squadron at the Battle of Helgoland, and she also received the most combat damage. However, although Peter Christian Holm commanded the JYLLAND, the painted portrait of the Danish squadron commander, Edouard Suenson, is the Danish officer’s image most frequently reproduced regarding the Battle of Helgoland, and he was stationed aboard the frigate NIELS JUEL rather than the JYLLAND as many suppose.

The frigate JYLLAND, a beautiful and gracefully designed frigate to plans drafted by the Danish naval architect Otto Frederik Suenson (1846-1864), is now preserved as a Danish naval memorial and museum ship in the quaint coastal town of Ebeltoft, Denmark, located on the Jutland peninsula after which the JYLLAND is named.

Compared to the Battle of Helgoland, the Battle of Lyngor in 1811, in which Commodore Holm’s grandfather commanded the Danish frigate NAJADEN, is virtually unknown to English readers, although the Battle of Lyngor is one of the most written-about naval battles by Danish and Norwegian naval historians.

Returning now to Hans Peter Holm, the value of his naval paintings is also enhanced because of the striking dearth of paintings of Danish warships during the age of sail. Ironically, by comparison to this incomprehensible and almost complete absence of paintings of Danish warships, Denmark’s Royal Archives has preserved perhaps the second largest collection, of any nation in the world, of official naval plans of warships (i.e., primarily Danish warships) during the age of sail.

So many preserved official design plans, yet so few paintings, of  Danish naval ships!

Like his father, Commodore Hans Peter Holm saw significant service as a shipboard commander of some of Denmark’s major warships. However, unlike his father, who had his “hour upon the stage” of Danish naval history when he commanded the frigate JYLLAND in the celebrated Battle of Helgoland, Commodore Holm never saw combat, particularly while exercising command of a warship, because Denmark was at peace during almost all of his service life.

To return once again to the concept of the “provenance” of Hans Peter Holm’s paintings of Danish naval ships, some apparently set in exotic colonial surroundings, we see that our appreciation of these paintings is significantly enhanced by their association with the Holm naval family and their interesting service history. Thus, the value of this integrated ensemble of paintings, personal and family photos, and the family history, is far greater than the value of the sum of its individual parts.

The discovery of these family paintings also offers an opportunity to glimpse a view of the life of an extended Danish naval family that represents a microcosm of the Danish naval history, as well as of Danish colonial history, of their age: the routine Danish naval service life from young cadet to the grave; the exotic colonial past in the Danish West Indies, Iceland, and the Faero Islands; the Danish navy’s transition from sail to steam, from wood to iron hulled warships, the professional achievement and satisfaction of independent shipboard command of significant Danish warships, and the celebrated naval Battle of Helgoland in 1864.

In the sweeping panorama of Danish naval and colonial history outlined above, the Holm family was there!

Biographical sketches of the Danish naval service histories of both Hans Peter Holm and his father, Peter Christian Holm, and his grandfather and namesake, Hans Peter Holm (1772-1812), and two earlier ancestors, all of who were Danish naval officers, which are important to the provenance of the Holm naval paintings, are provided below.

Service Profile: Hans Peter Holm (1847-1929)

Hans Peter Holm was born in Copenhagen in 1847, and at the young age of 14 entered into the Danish navy as a cadet, thus being two years older than his father when his father began his naval career as a Danish naval cadet at the age of 12. After six years as a cadet, H. P. Holm was promoted to Lieutenant in 1867, and two years thereafter, to the rank of 1st Lieutenant.

Hans Peter Holm’s first significant shipboard duty assignment was in 1879-1880 aboard the wooden-hull, screw-corvette DAGMAR while she conducted a round-trip voyage to the Danish West Indies, the place where H. P. Holm’s father was born.

Hans Peter Holm was promoted to the rank of Captain in 1883 and received his first shipboard command in 1884, of the armored schooner ABSALON, which was apparently serving as a troop transport. ABSALON was built of iron in England in 1862, was powered with English-built, 500 horsepower steam engines, and was armed at this time with 1-60 pdr. and 2-18 pdr. rifled cannon, mounted in unique (for a Danish naval warship) pivot mounts (to provide sufficient traverse to allow for a wide arc of fire on either side of the ship), located on a central axis, with the 18 pdrs. positioned at the bow and stern. This vessel was of sleek appearance, with a large funnel amidships.

H. P. Holm’s next duty post was aboard the iron-built, 5,332 ton armored battery ship HELGOLAND (by comparison, ABSALON displaced 533 tons). HELGOLAND was an unusual design of low freeboard and something of a coastal monitor. Holm’s service aboard the HELGOLAND was followed by his command of the brig ORNEN, a wooden-hull sail training ship, in 1894, and then his command of the cruiser GEJSER in 1896, a relatively new vessel, having been built domestically in Denmark in 1892, by the commercial firm of Burmeister & Wain.

In 1897, Hans Peter Holm achieved the naval rank of Commodore, his final rank in Danish naval service.

In 1901-1902, Hans Peter Holm captained the steel-hulled cruiser VALKYRIEN (displacement: 2,972 tons; armament 2-8.2 inch and 6-5.9 inch guns, with some lighter caliber weapons) when she was acting as the “station ship” (“Stationsskib”) in the Danish West Indies.

It was during the 1901-1902 tour of duty in the Danish West Indies that Holm and the “station ship” VALKYRIEN rendered humanitarian assistance to the victims of a catastrophic volcano explosion on the French colonial island of Martinique, an explosion which caused horrific loss of life, and which constituted one of the greatest if not the greatest natural catastrophe that has ever occurred in the Carribean during recorded history.

Photographic evidence of Hans Peter Holm in uniform show him to have been a highly-decorated Danish naval officer with, among other important-looking decorations, at least two classes of the Danish Order of the Dannebrog. Unfortunately, the full list of Hans Peter Holm’s decorations, or the purposes for which they were awarded, are not known to this author.

Aside from his shipboard commands, Hans Peter Holm held important administrative appointments ashore. He retired from the navy in 1907, and died in 1929.