Everybody knows the RMS Titanic. The legendary, luxurious cruise ship was just four days into its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City when it struck an iceberg and sunk into the ocean. Over a thousand people lost their lives, from crew members to passengers.
People are still talking about the event and the vehicle, over a century later. Aside from speaking about the different lives and identities onboard the Titanic, others still talk about the loss of cargo. This is because the ship contained a lot of commercial cargo, such as hundreds of cases of wines, bales of rubber, cork, and raw silk.
But it’s the items that the passengers carried with them aboard the ship that get the most discourse. One of the items aboard the Titanic was carried by first-class passenger and survivor William E. Carter, who decided to leave on the ship instead of the RMS Olympic. Among his treasures was a 1912 Renault Type CB Coupe de Ville, which was stored in the forward hold of the ship.
But the most expensive single item was not the car. It was a 1912 painting. La Circassienne au bain was created by Merry-Joseph Blondel, who belonged to Swedish businessman Mauritz Håkan Björnström-Steffansson. He survived by jumping into one of the last lifeboats, but his painting did not. The insurance claim after the tragic event was estimated to be $100,000, equivalent to just over three million dollars today.
The artwork featured a full-length portrait of a woman stepping into a bath. Blondel was known to have completed the work within only a few years of his return to Paris. According to the insurance claim, the painting stood approximately eight feet tall and four feet wide.
A reproduction of the La Circassienne au bain was done by an anonymous artist going by the sobriquet John Parker in color in oil on canvas sometime in the early 2010s, so people in the current time have an idea of what the lost work could have looked like.
Image credit: Willy Stöwer