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Martin Franz Glüsing was a marine painter of Hamburg who had been a seafarer for several
years before devoting himself to painting. A self-taught artist who signed his paintings "Fräncis-
Glüsing", he attained initial success in the mid 1920s when one of his compositions appeared in a representative book published by Felix Graf Luckner. Glüsing portrayed primarily large-scale sailing ships and fishing vessels. To this day, his renown has remained limited to Hamburg and the surrounding area. His paintings are regularly offered for sale on the art market.

The marine painter Geo Wolters (1866-1943) was a native of Hamburg. He did not enjoy an academic education as an artist, but trained privately with the marine painters Hermann Rudolf Hardorff and Friedrich Wilhelm Schwinge. He was not only a painter, but also a very successful racing sailor who won a considerable number of international prizes. He is the only German marine painter to have possessed a license "auf kleiner Fahrt" (i.e. for navigation in the North and Baltic Seas up to 61° north and in the English Channel). Artistically, he was interested primarily in small ship navigation on the Lower Elbe. This is also the subject of a portfolio containing twenty etchings of the year 1925 - undoubtedly the most important work to have come out of Wolters's studio. Yet he also devoted his attention to small ship navigation and the small harbours on the Lower Elbe in his numerous oil paintings. Wolters is known above all in Hamburg and on the Lower Elbe, where his paintings are often also traded on the art market. He did not leave behind a catalogue of his oeuvre.

In the mid 1930s, the graphic artist Oskar Dolhart - whose name does not appear in any of the major reference works - attracted attention as a naval painter. He belonged to a group of artists who focused on Germany's massively enlarged naval fleet and did much to spread the propaganda image of warships and wartime events. Dolhart claimed to have been a pupil of Robert Schmidt-Hamburg - a statement left unverified by the Schmidt estate. During the war, Oskar Dolhart produced a series of cover illustrations for the new front magazine Die Seeflieger der deutschen Luftwaffe, and was in charge of its graphics for two and a half years. After he left the magazine for reasons unknown, he served as a soldier until the end of the war. After 1945, as far as is known, he stopped painting wartime subjects. Dolhart lived in Holzminden and resumed his activities as a commercial graphic artist. He retained his links with the water, however, by painting watercolours of the River Weser and the Weserbergland.

Eduard Edler's life and work have not been closely examined to date. Since documents and reports by his contemporaries can scarcely be found, only a biographical rapprochement can be undertaken. Paintings from Edler's studio keep turning up in the art trade unaccompanied by any information on their production. At present, the following is known about him: Edler first made a name for himself during the 1930s as a ship portraitist and poster-painter in the service of German shipping companies. It was in those years - preceding the Second World War - that he scored his greatest successes. During the 1940s, when the one-hundredth anniversary of Hapag, Germany's largest shipping company was approaching in 1947, Edler received a major order. He was asked to do portraits of all the ships that had sailed under the flag of Hapag since 1847 and never been illustrated or photographed. Pictures of sister-ships or shipyard drawings were made available to him as bases to work from. He even painted ships which had been under construction in 1944 and 1945 and never been delivered to the Hamburg shipping company due to the outcome of the war, depicting them sailing the high seas under the Hapag flag. This order, however, explains why the largest single collection of his paintings is today owned by the Hapag-Lloyd AG. The exact number of ship portraits Edler painted is unknown, since a catalogue of his works does not exist. The planned transfer of his estate to the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte, as fixed in his will, never came about. The documentary value of the paintings has to be examined from case to case, for Edler also had the gift of portraying ships about whose appearance he knew little, or next to nothing. After World War II he seems to have become less productive. The paintings located so far are primarily rendered in tempera rather than in oils. As far as his artistic abilities are concerned, it must be said that they are inferior to those of contemporaries who also worked as ship portraitists, such as Robert Schmidt-Hamburg or Walter Zeeden.