Christopher Rave (20 February 1881 – 13 January 1933) was a German painting artist, explorer of
polar regions and professor.
Life
Rave was a popular painter of naval art living in
Hamburg. Between 1900 and 1909 he created about 300 paintings about 8,000 years of navigation. 1911 they were exhibited in Hamburg and sold in particular. The paintings were reproduced as postcards by two publishers, one from Hamburg, the other one from the Netherlands.
In 1910 he experienced the accident of German tall ship ''
Preußen
Preußen or Preussen is the German word for Prussia.
It also refers to:
Ships
* ''Preußen'' (ship), windjammer built in 1902
* SMS ''Preußen'' (1873), armored frigate
* SMS ''Preußen'' (1903), pre-dreadnought Battleship
* , vorpostenboot
...
'' as a passenger, running aground close to
Dover
Dover () is a town and major ferry port in Kent, South East England. It faces France across the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the English Channel at from Cap Gris Nez in France. It lies south-east of Canterbury and east of Maidstone ...
.
In 1912 he was member of German exploration voyage to
Spitsbergen
Spitsbergen (; formerly known as West Spitsbergen; Norwegian: ''Vest Spitsbergen'' or ''Vestspitsbergen'' , also sometimes spelled Spitzbergen) is the largest and the only permanently populated island of the Svalbard archipelago in northern Norw ...
. His task was documentation by photographs and paintings. The voyage under the command of
Herbert Schröder-Stranz
Herbert Schröder-Stranz (9 June 1884 – 15 August 1912) was a German officer and Exploration, explorer of polar regions. He led the German Arctic Expedition of 1912.
Biography
Schröder-Stranz was born at his family estate at Strączno, Stranz ...
and
Alfred Ritscher
Alfred Ritscher (23 May 1879 in Bad Lauterberg – 30 March 1963 in Hamburg) was a German polar explorer. A ''Kapitän zur See'' in the ''Kriegsmarine'', he led the third German Antarctic Expedition in 1938–39, which mapped the New Swabia (ger ...
as captain of the ship ''Herzog Ernst'' failed, and just seven out of 15 crew survived. In 1913 Rave published his experiences
Tagebuch von der verunglückten Expedition Schröder-Stranz: mit Federzeichnungen vom Verfasser' (Diary of the failed expedition of Schröder-Stranz).
Having cancer of the throat and hardly able to talk Rave shot himself on January 13, 1933. His tomb, designed by his student Valentin Kraus from
Munich, is in Hamburg Ohlsdorf gra