Presented here by agreement between Faustus and the artist.

As President’s Day special (many of our U.S. readers have a day off work, hooray!) I am presenting a big commission by the artist Silverado, whose work has been featured here before at Erotic Mad Science. This is another Brides of the Grote Opdracht illustration, a theme on which we have seen work before by Rafael Suzarte, Lucy Fidelis, and Dark Vanessa. For those of you who might have missed them, the backstory for all of these illustrations is the following pseudo-news story, a part of the Bait continuity.

Crews operating a submersible salvage robot near the Southwest Pacific island of Motofupo made an unexpected discovery last week of the nameplate and other debris believed to have belonged to a Dutch sailing ship lost over a century ago. The Grote Opdracht had sailed from Rotterdam in early 1886 taking various cargo and passengers to the Dutch East Indies. She had made her last port of call at Singapore before sailing east with an intended destination in the Molucca Islands. She was never heard from again. That her nameplate was found so far from any plausible course she might have followed suggests that she might have been caught in a freak tropical storm and driven a long distance before finally foundering near Motofupo. The loss of the Grote Opdracht was made especially poignant by the fact that her passenger consist included several young unmarried Dutch and Flemish women, who were traveling east to be brides of Dutch colonial civil servants working in the Moluccas. This tragedy was the subject of a popular if mournful late nineteenth-century Dutch ballad “Mijn geliefde meisje slaapt in de zuidelijke zee.” (“My beloved girl sleeps in the southern sea.”).

I think Silverado really lavished a great deal of attention on this illustration, so it would be worth your while to right-click on the picture in the post and download the high-resolution version. If you like his work generally, I can strongly recommend his DeviantArt gallery.