The City Hall architect Ragnar Östberg created the museum, with ship motifs in the floor mosaic, seahorse-shaped door handles and a ship's bell in the balustrade – among other things. Even the building itself is in the form of a maritime object – an anchor.
Surrounded by spectacular models and towering figureheads sits the stern section of Gustav III's "luxury yacht" Amphion from 1778, mounted in the wall of our great Memorial Hall. See the original cabin and learn of the ship's dramatic history.
The shipbuilder Fredrik Henrik af Chapman's immense and detailed original models give us a picture of the ships of the line, galleys, sloops and frigates that once patrolled the Baltic Sea.
It took officer Frans Oscar Carlsson 30,000 hours to complete his masterpiece. You can imagine the richness of detail if we tell you that the model has a working steam engine, realistically fitted air and exhaust pipes and movable double locks on the doors!
The passenger steamship Birger Jarl's interior is both detailed and imaginatively designed. It and the other cross-section models in the museum are well worth examining a little closer.
This well-preserved magnificence model from the mid-1600s is one of the museum's most enigmatic objects. Who built it? Why was it built? Is it really a representation of the Amarant ship? And why is this closed model so sumptuous inside?
Which ship was biggest? An East Indiaman from the 1700s, RMS Titanic or the Finland cruise ship Diana II in 1979? We depict the evolution of ships from the Bronze Age to the 2000s with the help of 81 well-made models in scale 1:200.
The large stern ornament of King Charles XI on horseback originally adorned a warship and is unique because few similar ornaments have been preserved for posterity.
Lars Lerin's painting "Matroser" [Seamen] is one of our recent acquisitions, but the museum also houses maritime paintings by Eugene Jansson, Jacob Hägg and other artists.