Marine Painting - Maritime Painting of The Dutch Golden Age

Maritime Painting of The Dutch Golden Age

The Dutch Republic relied on fishing and trade by sea for its exceptional wealth, had naval wars with Britain and other nations during the period, and was criss-crossed by rivers and canals. By 1650 95% of ships passing from the North Sea into the Baltic were Dutch. Pictures of sea battles told the stories of a Dutch navy at the peak of its glory, though today it is usually the "calms", or more tranquil scenes that are highly estimated. It is therefore no surprise that the genre of maritime painting was enormously popular in Dutch Golden Age painting, and taken to new heights in the period by Dutch artists. As with landscapes, the move from the artificial elevated view typical of earlier marine painting to a low viewpoint was a crucial step, made by the first great Dutch marine specialist Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom.

More often than not, even small ships fly the Dutch tricolour, and many vessels can be identified as naval or one of the many other government ships. Many pictures included some land, with a beach or harbour viewpoint, or a view across an estuary. Other artists specialized in river scenes, from the small pictures of Salomon van Ruysdael with little boats and reed-banks to the large Italianate landscapes of Aelbert Cuyp, where the sun is usually setting over a wide river. The genre naturally shares much with landscape painting, and in developing the depiction of the sky the two went together; many landscape artists also painted beach and river scenes. Artists probably often had precise models of ships available to help them achieve accurate depictions. Artists included Jan Porcellis, Simon de Vlieger, Jan van de Cappelle, and Hendrick Dubbels. The prolific workshop of Willem van de Velde the Elder and his son was the leader of the later decades, tending, as at the beginning of the century, to make the ship the subject, but incorporating the advances of the tonal works of earlier decades where the emphasis had been on the sea and the weather. The Younger van de Velde was very strongly influenced by Simon de Vlieger, whose pupil he was. The Elder van de Velde had first visited England in the 1660s, but both father and son left Holland permanently for London in 1672, leaving the master of heavy seas, the German-born Ludolf Bakhuizen, as the leading artist in Amsterdam. Reinier Nooms, who had been a sailor and signed his works Zeeman ("seaman"), specialized in highly accurate battle scenes and ship portraits, with some interest also in effects of light and weather, and it was his style that was to be followed by many later specialized artists. Abraham Storck and Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten were other battle specialists. Nooms also painted several scenes of dockyard maintenance and repair operations, which are unusual and of historical interest.

The tradition of marine painting continued in the Flemish part of the Netherlands, but was much less prominent, and took longer to shake off the Mannerist style of shipwrecks amid fantastic waves. Most paintings were small zeekens, whereas the Dutch painted both large and small works. The leading artist was Bonaventura Peeters. The Dutch style was exported to other nations by various artists who emigrated, as well as mere emulation by foreign artists. The most important emigrants were the leading Amsterdam marine artists, the father and son Willem van de Velde. Having spent decades chronicling Dutch naval victories over the English, after the collapse of the art market in the disastrous rampjaar of 1672, they accepted an invitation from the English court to move to London, and spent the rest of their lives painting the wars from the other side. Artists loosely said to have "followed" their style include Isaac Sailmaker, although he was a much earlier Dutch emigrant who had preceded their arrival in England by at least 20 years, and whose style is very different from theirs; as well as Peter Monamy, whose style derives from numerous marine painters besides the van de Veldes, such as Nooms, Peeters and Bakhuizen; and several others, such as Thomas Baston and the Vale brothers, who painted in the native English tradition.

Increasingly, marine art was already mostly left to specialists, with rare exceptions like Rembrandt's powerful The Storm on the Sea of Galilee of 1633, his only true seascape. Van Dyck made some fine drawings of the English coast from boats off Rye, apparently when waiting for his ship to the continent, but never produced any paintings. Some of Ruben's paintings involve the sea and ships, but are so extravagant and stylised that they can hardly be called marine art. However Claude Lorrain developed an influential type of harbour scene, usually with a view out to a sea with a rising or setting sun, and extravagant classical buildings rising on both sides of the channel. This elaborated on a tradition of Italianate harbour scenes by Northern artists (Italian ones took little interest in such scenes) that goes back at least as far as Paul Brill and was especially popular in Flanders, with Bonaventura Peeters and Hendrik van Minderhout, an emigrant from Rotterdam, as the leading exponents there, and Jan Baptist Weenix in the Republic.