On “Water, Wind, and Waves: Marine Paintings from the Dutch Golden Age”
The New Criterion
The National Gallery of Art’s ongoing exhibition “Water, Wind, and Waves: Marine Paintings from the Dutch Golden Age” brings together masterworks of seventeenth-century seascape painting, a rarely exhibited genre intimately connected to the Dutch Republic’s rise to global maritime power. On view through November 25, the exhibition includes nearly fifty paintings, prints, drawings, and antique ship models, which all explore the Dutch relationship to the sea in the seventeenth century. With monumental canvases of roiling oceans and warships cracking against shoals, the exhibition’s curator, Alexandra Libby, presents a vision that contradicts the common view of the Northern Baroque. The hushed interiors of Vermeer find no quarter here.
A work of art tells much about its audience, and these paintings reflect the aspirations and anxieties of the Dutch Republic’s ascendant classes. Merchants, bankers, and shipbuilders, made newly wealthy by maritime commerce, broke the conventional molds of royal and religious artistic patronage and sought instead to advertise their status and success.
The seascape painters also found willing patrons in the seven admiralties of the Dutch Republic, who commissioned grand canvases to fill their boardrooms and meeting halls. Never far from its enemies and trading partners, the Republic spent the majority of the seventeenth century embroiled in conflicts with the Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese navies. Maritime rivalry was at the forefront of national concerns, and patrons sought artwork that put the Dutch Republic on equal footing with its rivals. Commissioned works featured harbors replete with thousands of ships and richly gilded men-of-war that captured the might and fight of the little maritime nation that could.
Befitting their Golden Age pedigree, the seascape painters blended accurate detail with a healthy respect for the sailing experience. Artists often boarded ships to capture the details and esprit de corps that resonated with patrons. That common experience produced a maritime fluency shared by artist and audience alike and became a calling card for the genre’s finest practitioners. Reinier Nooms signed his paintings as “Zeeman” (seaman) in a nod to his earlier sailing career, while the painter Henrick Vroom boasted of surviving a shipwreck off the coast of Portugal. One can’t quite imagine the Art Basel set embracing such a swashbuckling ethos.
The exhibition’s main gallery is dominated by the knife-edged waves of Willem van de Velde the Younger’s Dutch Fleet Assembling Before the Four Days’ Battle of 11–14 June 1666 (1670). This canvas depicts warships gathering in the open ocean, in preparation for one of the largest and longest naval engagements fought during the age of sail. The work was commissioned by the Dutch admiralty in the years after the battle and reached the zenith of high emotion, nautical accuracy, and technical skill. In Van de Velde’s hands, atmospheric effects like the froth-capped waves and shades of ocean water become essential elements of the visual narrative.
Viewers take on the vantage point of a seaman lashed to a ship’s stern, suspended above the grasping swells of obsidian waves. In the foreground, the stately seventy cannon Liefde (Love) and Gouden Leeuwen (Golden Lions) warships struggle against gale-force winds. In a bit of atmospheric foreshadowing, the Liefde is plunged in the shadows of a heavy cloud, its sails flailing weakly against gusts. Further afield, the shining latticework of the Gouden Leeuwen keels strongly but outpaces the gathering storm.
Van de Velde deftly wields weather to encode a grim message in his blustery seascapes. Original research by Libby confirmed the fate of Van de Velde’s struggling ship. The Liefde perished in the Four Days’ Battle, alongside fifteen hundred Dutch crewmen and just as many English. Just as a dazzling still life might contain a memento mori, one can imagine the artwork hanging in an admiral’s office, serving as a reminder of naval might and human frailty.
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As their countrymen explored the Atlantic, the seascape painters navigated the free markets of Amsterdam. By the mid-seventeenth century, the weakening grip of trade guilds allowed artists greater autonomy over their professional development and sales. Artwork could be purchased in bookstores, at fairs or auctions, directly from artists, or through independent dealers. And it was enjoyed by all. The glut of artistic talent and the competitive open market compelled many painters to create their art at affordable price points.
Before dying poor and without work, Rembrandt van Rijn rode the wave of Golden Age wealth, and the exhibition provides a glimpse of his mid-career successes as an enterprising merchant. A collection of his landscape prints on display may not command the attention of The Night Watch (1642), but they do provide a window into what a middle-class businessman might collect and display in his home. Rembrandt would walk the outskirts of Amsterdam, sketching the modest sights of everyday life. His confident reductionism is a joy to behold—in Six’s Bridge (ca. 1645), a few loosely jotted lines evoke a small boat’s mast, sail, and flying pennant, while the rest is unceremoniously obscured behind the grassy banks of a canal. With a touch of irreverence, Rembrandt repudiates the high drama of Van de Velde’s ill fated warships.
Competing against the grand ship models in the first room of the exhibit, Simon de Vlieger’s Estuary at Day’s End (ca. 1640–45) presents a humble scene. Taking the common and unpleasant chore of boat maintenance as its subject, De Vlieger renders it into a serene example of divine providence. A modest ship rests on its side, beached on a sandbar during low tide. Small figures work to boil tar and paint caulking pitch across the boat’s exposed hull. On the horizon, a man-of-war is cushioned in white smoke as it fires a cannon salute for an approaching dignitary. De Vlieger obscures the warship behind the laborers on the sandbar, as if the pageantry were a negligible afterthought.
This is artwork for the ascendant classes, the tradesmen who would sooner identify with the pitch painter than the navy admiral. Above the workers, towering clouds are backlit by the sun against a mottled silver sky. The last golden rays of daylight poke through the cloud cover: “fingers of God” that symbolized God’s favor to Dutch audiences. These earthbound sensibilities would appeal to the upwardly mobile merchants who worked hard for their good fortune and found opportunity in new markets where others saw none.
“Water, Wind, and Waves” resurrects a relationship between the ocean and commerce that has been largely forgotten in our airfreighted society. Driven by the seduction of opportunity, terrifying risk, and respect for the enterprising spirit, the seascape painters, much like their patrons, set out to conquer the rising world of waters, and did so in spectacular fashion.
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 37 Number 1 , on page 41.