Collection: The Art of the Boat

Now preserved at Mystic Seaport, the Rosenfeld Collection is the largest single collection of maritime photographs in the world, with more than one million images spanning the years 1881 to 1992 and representing the work of Morris Rosenfeld & Sons, James Burton, Charles Bolles, and others.

Morris Rosenfeld was a commercial photographer. But even if some would call him a craftsman rather than an artist, Morris Rosenfeld almost always captured the essence of the boat, its poise in the water, perhaps its relationship with the invisible wind, and often its relationship with its crew. At his best he defined maritime photography in the first half of the 1900s—the dynamic balance of sky and water, the perspective that favors the boat, the moment that defines its nature. Unquestionably, there was art in his craft.