Fritz Sigfried George Melbye (1826-1869)

Melbye, a Danish marine artist, left Denmark with his elder brother Anton for the island of Saint Thomas in the Danish Antilles in 1849. He first visited Venezuela in 1850, sketching in the vicinity of Calabozo and San Juan de los Morros. He met Camille Pissarro in Saint Thomas in the spring of 1851, and the two worked together for the following three years, touring Venezuela together from late 1852 until August 1854. Melbye returned to Europe in 1856, but continued to travel in the 1860s, to Cuba in 1861 (see lot 45) and to Jamaica with Frederic Edwin Church in 1865. He exhibited Venezuelan subjects in the United States through the mid-1860s. His studio, comprising hundreds of oil sketches and drawings left with Church in New York when he set out for China in the late 1860s, now constitutes part of the Collection at Olana, and includes works by Pissarro dating from the Saint Thomas and Venezuelan years.