Whale tale: a Dutch seascape and its lost Leviathan

Earlier this year a conservator at the Hamilton Kerr Institute made a surprising discovery while working on a 17th-century painting owned by the Fitzwilliam Museum. As Shan Kuang cleaned the surface, she revealed the beached whale that had been the intended focus of the composition. The artwork is now back on display in the Fitzwilliam's newly-refurbished gallery of Dutch Golden Age painting. As I worked across the surface a man appeared - and then next to him a shape that looked like a sail. At the end of the treatment, the whale had returned as a key component of the composition, just as the artist had intended. Shan Kuang In 1873 the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, was given a number of Dutch landscape paintings by a benefactor called Richard Kerrich. Among these works of art was a beach scene painted by the artist Hendrick van Anthonissen early in the 17th century. Anthonissen depicts groups of people clustered on a sandy beach at the small town of Scheveningen. Other figures stand on the cliffs and, on the shore, several boats have been pulled up on the sand.