Museum presents gallery talk by ship model artist Erik Ronnberg, Jr.

The Cape Ann Museum is pleased to present a gallery talk by ship model artist and marine historian, Erik Ronnberg, Jr. The talk entitled America, Cape Ann’s Schooner Yacht will be held on Saturday, September 5, 2009 at 10:30 a.m. This program is included with Museum admission. Reservations are required; to reserve a space please call 978-283-0455, ext.11.

Erik Ronnberg’s large scale model of the schooner yacht America which he completed in 2002 is on view in the Fitz Henry Lane Gallery. Accompanying the model is an 1851 oil painting by Fitz Henry Lane entitled Yacht America from Three Views and a presentation telescope given to the America’s skipper, Richard Brown. The painting by Lane once belonged to famed yacht designer L. Francis Herrshoff and is on loan to the Museum from a private collection through October 31.

Erik Ronnberg Jr., born in 1944, apprenticed in his father’s workshop in Rockport, MA. Ronnberg’s father, Erik Ronnberg Sr., was an internationally known model maker from Sweden, and was once first mate aboard the last square-rigger to deliver a cargo in Boston Harbor. After the apprenticeship, Ronnberg joined the industrial model making firm of Atkins & Merrill in Sudbury. He also apprenticed at the Newark Museum in Newark, NJ and was Associate Curator of Maritime History at the New Bedford Whaling Museum for four years. Ronnberg returned to Rockport in 1973 to help his father run a hobby and model shop and designed kits for commercial manufacturers and scratch-built models.

Ronnberg was editor of the Nautical Research Journal and consultant to the rebuilding of the Lette G. Howard at the South Street Seaport Museum in Manhattan. He has also