This painting shows the recently built German ship ‘Admiral Scheer’ engaged in action during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The vessel, named after Admiral Reinhard Scheer, who had commanded the German High Seas Fleet at the battle of Jutland, was a ‘Deutschland’-class heavy cruiser, usually known as a pocket battleship, launched in 1933 and commissioned the following year. The vessel’s first service in July 1936 was evacuating German civilians from the developing civil war in Spain. She had an on-going involvement in that conflict, in protecting the delivery of German weapons to the Nationalist forces and reporting on Soviet ships supplying the Republicans. On 31st May 1937, in reprisal for an air attack on her sister ship the ‘Deutschland’, she bombarded Republican bases on the coast of Almería in south-east Spain, which is the subject of Bergen’s painting. The ‘Admiral Scheer’ is shown in the centre of the composition in starboard-quarter view, firing in flashes and great clouds of black smoke towards the coastline in the distance. Around her arise spumes of white spray from shells hitting the water.