Here’s something delicious for those of you who love to see great draftsmanship. And I do mean great – some of the work here is enough to pin back a fella’s eyelids and make him dribble.
This is Frederik Henrik AF Chapman’s Architectura Navalis. Published in 1768, it is a compendium of drawings of what Chapman, a prominent Swedish naval architect, considered to be the best and most interesting ships and boats of the time. Best of all, you can see them here:
http://www.sjohistoriska.se/
For a timeline and a list of Chapman relics, click here:
http://www.bruzelius.info/
Finally, here is one more postage-stamp sized image from the collection. I should warn you that the downloads held by the museum are in the tiff format and they’re also pretty big – you’ll need an image editor or viewer with a tiff facility to see them, and you’ll need something a little newer and with more memory than the old Windows 2000 laptop wordbox I use to view them easily.
