What do Eliot, Maine, a Swedish singer, a slave ship, and PT Barnum have in common? Hint: It’s made of wood, really old, looks like a lady, came back to Portsmouth, NH, and went on the Sotheby’s auction block in 2008.
History trivia rarely gets more convoluted than the knotty saga of the Jenny Lind figurehead. I first reported this story after meeting Swedish maritime antique dealer Karl-Eric Svardskog. He was in the USA in 1997, drumming up interest in a mysterious figurehead that he claimed belonged to a Piscataqua-built clipper ship. After two years of study, having shipped “Jenny” across the globe, he was preparing to part with her. But let’s begin at the beginning.
The Phenomenal Jenny Lind
The baby destined to become the most famous female singer of the 19th century first vocalized in Stockholm, Sweden in 1820. Born to an impoverished mother and a deadbeat dad, Jenny Lind, the soprano “nightingale,” became the toast of Europe in her early 20s. Plain, she claimed, and painfully shy, Jenny had the voice of an angel. She turned down the marriage proposal from children’s author Hans Christian Anderson, who legend says, penned “The Ugly Duckling” in her honor.
Jenny toured Europe with composer Felix Mendelssohn. This time she fell in love, but Mendelssohn was married.
it’s hard to overstate her popularity. A century before Beatlemania, Jenny Lind’s British tour set off a popularity explosion called “Jenny Rage.” People mobbed her concerts. In 1850, entertainment promoter PT Barnum brought Jenny to the United States. Barnum later formed the famous touring circus that bears his name. Think of Barnum as the Ed Sullivan who introduced Jenny to America with
In a 100-concert tour. Jenny was bigger than all of Barnum’s acts before her — bigger than three-foot-four-inch Tom Thumb, more popular than Jumbo the elephant, more curious than Chang and Eng the Siamese Twins and the Feejee Mermaid rolled into one.
During the Jenny Rage, people named towns, furniture, their schools and their kids after Jenny Lind. Jenny Lind, North Carolina, took her name because, historians there claim, she sang a song beneath a tree nearby. At least four contemporary ships were named in her honor, including the Nightingale, which many believe was the fastest and sleekest clipper ship ever constructed in the Portsmouth Harbor area, perhaps in the world.
The Evidence in the Email
A few years after reporting this story, I got an email from a reader of my website who had seen my article on the Jenny Lind carving. She said her great-grandfather Christian Ingebretsen had been one of the final owners of the clipper Nightingale. The reader had an oil painting of the Nightingale flying the Norwegian flag. She wrote: ” The oil painting that I have clearly shows a figurehead that appears to be a woman with blonde hair. It appears very much the same as the photo [of the carving] on the website with the ship and the Jenny Lind figure superimposed.”
I contacted Karl-Eric, who happened to be in the United States at the time working on a book about his beloved statue, and told him about the email. When the reader sent photos of the painting, the author, with publisher Peter Randall, rushed expectantly into my office. This, he said, might be proof he had been searching for. We studied the digital picture on the computer screen, staring at a magnified image until our eyes ached. The tiny shape on the bow of the Nightingale painting looked like the figurehead of Jenny Lind. Absolutely!!. But, on closer examination, it also looked, well –like a speck.
Jenny Lind on tour
To say the antique dealer became obsessed with his wooden Jenny is no exaggeration. Like a modern-day P.T. Barnum, Karl-Eric Svardskog brought the statue back to America in 2001. He wrote a book, published by the Portsmouth Marine Society and Peter Randall, that chronicles his efforts to prove the Nightingale theory. Svardskog‘s case, although supported only by circumstantial evidence, is strong.
The author did his homework. Studies of documents, tests on the wood and paint of the figurehead, all line up with his theory that the carving may indeed be Jenny Lind from the Piscataqua clipper Nightingale. Revell Carr of the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut is one of many experts impressed by Svardskog’s evidence. Carr notes in the book that only a dozen of Mystic’s 70 carved figureheads have been accurately identified.
Early in the summer of 2001 Svardskog unveiled the figurehead during a concert at the Portsmouth Music Hall. The evening featured two winners of a Jenny Lind contest for sopranos — one American, one Swedish — another testament to Lind’s enduring fame. Ironically, for reasons unknown, the flesh-and-blood Jenny Lind refused to perform in Portsmouth during her 1851 American tour. Despite the snub, Portsmouth presented three Jennies that night in 2001 –two singing like nightingales, one as silent as a block of wood dramatically lit at the back of the stage. It was a memorable sight.
Jenny for Sale
After a brief exhibition at the Portsmouth Athenaeum, Jenny Lind went back into her specially built shipping crate for a trip to Connecticut. At Mystic Seaport, she communed with dozens of fellow figureheads. She has been exhibited from Norway to New York. She has been featured with a full symphony orchestra. Jenny has her own documentary. She has a second book, this one in Swedish. She was introduced to the king of Sweden and appeared in National Geographic.
But was this Jenny Lind really part of the Clipper Nightingale? The jury is still out. The Mariner’s Museum in Newport News, VA has a Jenny Lind figurehead of its own. Another similar figurehead with long flowing hair was reportedly carved in Salem, MA for the clipper ship Jenny Lind.
At a Portsmouth, NH reception in 2001, after uncrating the heavy statue, Svardskog gazed at the now familiar image as it turned slowly on an automated pedestal. “She haunts me,” he told this writer. “She is like a ghost.”
Jenny, like a ghost, did not respond.
After nearly two decades together, it was time for Jenny and her promoter to part. Unlike the original singer, this Jenny brings in no income. Shipping her around the globe has cost Svardskog untold thousands of dollars. Has tracing her history and making headlines turned the Jenny figurehead into auction gold? Svardskog has asked Sotheby’s auction house to put JennyLind on the block.
In 2008, following years of stewardship, Svardskog sold the 66-inch carved figure sold for $121,000. It is now in private hands.
FOR MORE INFO READ: Jenny Lind and the Clipper Nightingale Figurehead by Karl-Eric Svardskog (2007)
Copyright © 2007-2026 by J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.
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