Boats in a harbour and a yacht sailing away, also known as Harbour mole of Texel by Willem van de Velde the Younger, 1673

Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam

(image 3000×2040 px, 1.57 MB)

This painting by Willem van de Velde the Younger shows several boats at a harbor mole and a wijdschip with a headsail and a topsail in the foreground. On board of the latter there is group of people lively interacting with each other. Behind this boat there is another wijdschip with sails trimmed. The boats, masts, yards, sails and rigging form a complex composition in the left part of the painting. A careful observer can find a humorous detail: a freshly washed shirt left to dry on a rope in the rigging.

In the center and in the left corner there are two chaloupes. In the right side a richly decorated state yacht is sailing away towards the ships in the right background. It has just fired a salute and the grey smoke is obscuring the view of the boats behind it. The stern of the yacht bears the arms of Holland, indicating its owner – the Province of Holland.

This painting is mostly known under the name “Harbour Mole of Texel”. But this typical harbour scene can also be attributed to almost any other Dutch port.

The painter paid much attention to the light, shadows and reflections in the water, which was not an easy task given the complexity of composition. The choice of colors adds volume and perspective. The skies were painted using an expensive pigment Lapislazuli.

The author signed the painting in the left corner on the wooden beams of the mole. The signature contains the year 1673 as well as the place “in londe”. There is little doubt that this work was commissioned by Willem van de Velde soon after he moved to London from the Netherlands.

This painting is now in the collection of the museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Its origins are unknown. The museum has purchased it in 1866 at an auction in Paris. The information from the auction’s catalog allows assuming that it came from the 18^th century collection of Gerret Braamcamp. By a contradicting account a similar painting from the Braamcamp’s collection was discovered in 1859 in Brussels and was sold at an auction in London in 1925, which leaves the identity of the painting in Rotterdam unclear.

Source ID #hrdmmdk#

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Schepen op de rede (Ships on the Roadstead)

By Willem van de Velde the Younger, 1658

This work by Willem van de Velde displays a calm scene of Dutch merchant and fishing vessels on a roadstead in a still weather. In the middle of the painting a yacht with a richly decorated stern  dominates the scene while small boats shuffle goods and passengers between humble looking merchant ships.

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De Windstoot (The Gust)

By Willem van de Velde the Younger (ca. 1650-1707)

Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

The painting depicts a three masted ship and a small boat caught by  a raging storm.

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By Willem van de Velde the younger

Rijksmuesum Amsterdam

On the third day of the Four Days Battle, 3 (13) June 1666, the flagship of Vice-Admiral  George Ayscue ran aground on the Galloper Sand. Terrified by the approaching Dutch fireships the crew of the “Prince Royal” was forced to surrender. The flood tide subsequently floated the ship, but her rudder was disabled and de Ruyter ordered her burned – to the fury of Cornelis Tromp, to whose squadron she had struck.

‘And so we lost the second best ship in England, having ninety brass pieces of ordnance and eight hundred men, which was a great grief to all the rest of the fleet,’ noted the sailor Edward Barlow.

Even after fifty-six years of service, ‘she was like a castle in the sea, and I believe the best ship that ever was built in the world to endure battering,’ wrote the minister of king Charles, Sir Thomas Clifford, ‘but she is gone and this is an ill subject to be longer upon’.

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By Willem van de Velde, the Younger. 1673-1707

The full name of this painting is “Nightly Fighting Between Cornelis Tromp on the ‘Gouden Leeuw’ and Sir Edward Spragg on the ‘Royal Prince’ During the Battle of Texel (Kijkduin) on August 21, 1673: Episode From the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-74)”. In this batlle the Dutch navy fought the combined force of the Royal Navy and the French Fleet, the alliance brought by the Treaty of Dover. French King Louis XIV invaded the Dutch Republic in 1672 seeking to gain control over the Spanish Netherlands. A secret treaty with King Charles II pulled England into the conflict and started the third Anglo-Dutch War.

The picture displays an episode from the Battle of Texel with Dutch ships in their failed attempt to capture the English flagship ‘Royal Prince’ (in the center). In this engagement the flagship of the Dutch admiral Cornelis Tromp the ‘Gouden Leeuw’ has been badly damaged and is seen sinking to the right of the ‘Prince‘.

The painting is exhibited in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

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AN ENGLISH SIXTH-RATE SHIP FIRING A SALUTE AS A BARGE LEAVES; A ROYAL YACHT NEARBY

by Willem van de Velde, the Younger, 1706

A variety of shipping is shown in a calm. In the foreground on the left a small boat with two figures on board is rowing towards the left. One figure works at the oars and the other is standing up in the boat and attends to a fishing net on the starboard side. To the right is an elaborately decorated sixth-rate ship in port-quarter view. She flies a Union flag at the main and a pendant at the mizzen, which is probably a signal. Her port anchor is visible and may indicate that she is about to anchor. She is flying a salute to starboard as a ship’s barge in the centre pulls away from her port quarter. A figure leans in a leisurely manner from the mizzen top, while other figures are occupied on the deck and in the rigging. In the left middle-distance beyond is a royal yacht, viewed from before the port beam with her mainsail, topsail, foresail and jib set. Other vessels can be seen in the left distance. It is has been suggested that the main vessel is the ‘Peregrine Galley’, which was a 20-gun ship built at Sheerness in 1700, since it resembles an annotated pen and ink drawing of this vessel with manuscript notes relating to her decoration.

The artist was the younger son of Willem van de Velde the Elder. Born in Leiden, he studied under Simon de Vlieger in Weesp and in 1652 moved back to Amsterdam. He worked in his father’s studio and developed the skill of carefully drawing ships in tranquil settings. He changed his subject matter, however, when he came with his father to England in 1672-73, by a greater concentration on royal yachts, men-of-war and storm scenes. From this time painting sea battles for Charles II and his brother (and Lord High Admiral) James, Duke of York, and other patrons, became a priority. Unlike his father’s works, however, they were not usually eyewitness accounts. After his father’s death in 1693 his continuing role as an official marine painter obliged him to be more frequently present at significant maritime events. The painting is signed ‘W.V.Velde J 1706’.

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CANNON FIRED (HET KANONSCHOT)

By Willem van de Velde, the Younger, 1707

(Rijkmuseum Amsterdam)

A warship in calm waters fires a cannon. Two boats are on the either side of the ship. Another warship is seen in the distance.

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A DUTCH FLAGSHIP COMING TO ANCHOR WITH A STATES YACHT BEFORE A LIGHT AIR

By Willem van de Velde, the Younger, 1658

An early painting by the artist before he had developed his own artistic style of ship portrayal. In the left foreground is a States yacht, in starboard-quarter view, running towards the flagship under a white sprit-sail and a brown square sail boomed out to port. She is thought to be the yacht laid down for Prince Frederik Hendrik but completed after his death in 1647 for Willem II. A date inscribed in the cartouche above the rudderhead is understood to be the date of the picture although only ‘165?’ can now be clearly read. She bears the arms of Orange and lion supporters on the stern, and Dutch colours at the peak, stern and dipped on a staff at the masthead. Two trumpeters positioned in the stern face towards the right as they play their instruments. The yacht is towing a boat with two men in it.

In the left middle distance is a ship at anchor, in port-quarter view, believed from her stern decoration to be the ‘Huis te Zwieten’, built in 1653. She shows the arms of Amsterdam above the rudder as well as crossed anchors to either side of it, signifying the Admiralty, and flies a Dutch flag at the fore and also as an ensign. In the left background are two ships under sail, close-hauled on the starboard tack. Other ships and vessels lie in the distance. To the right a large ship in port-bow view is under way close-hauled on the starboard tack and firing a forward gun to starboard. This is probably the ‘Eendracht’, 76 guns, built in 1653, with a prominent turret on her quarter gallery and lion supporters just visible on the taffrail. This was the flagship of Lieutenant-Admiral J. van Wassenaer who assembled the fleet that was to sail to the Baltic in October 1658. She flies a Dutch flag at the main, a plain red ensign and a striped jack, red white and blue. Men are visible on the main topsail yard preparing to furl the sail.

Pulling to the right in the centre foreground is a ship’s boat with four oars a side, four distinguished people seated aft and a trumpeter standing forward. A figure standing in the stern is gesturing towards the notable men in the boat. Lieutenant-Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, promoted Vice-Admiral of Holland and Westfriesland in November 1653, flew his flag in the ‘Huis te Zwieten’ on convoy duty to the Mediterranean and back in 1654.

On 27 May 1658, at the time Wassenaer was assembling his Baltic squadron in the Texel, he once more sailed in her with a squadron for Portugal, and again in May 1659 when he led reinforcements to Wassenaer in Denmark. Assuming that the flag at the foremast of the ‘Huis te Zwieten’ signifies de Ruyter’s substantive rank of vice-admiral, the conjunction shown in the picture may therefore commemorate the scene in the Texel in the spring of 1658.

The artist was the younger son of Willem van de Velde the Elder. Born in Leiden, he studied under Simon de Vlieger in Weesp and in 1652 moved back to Amsterdam. He worked in his father’s studio and developed the skill of carefully drawing ships in tranquil settings. He changed his subject matter, however, when he came with his father to England in 1672-73, by a greater concentration on royal yachts, men-of-war and storm scenes. From this time painting sea battles for Charles II and his brother (and Lord High Admiral) James, Duke of York, and other patrons, became a priority. Unlike his father’s works, however, they were not usually eyewitness accounts. After his father’s death in 1693 his continuing role as an official marine painter obliged him to be more frequently present at significant maritime events. The painting is signed lower right ‘W.V.Velde’ and is unclearly dated to the 1650s as already noted.

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The Battle of the Texel was fought between the Dutch and an Anglo-French fleet near Texel Island, off the Dutch coast. The low horizon, dramatic lighting and gunsmoke render this majestic work an immediate experience for the viewer. It was painted in 1687 as a Dutch commission, when van de Velde had already long been an ‘English’ court painter. The picture may even have been ordered by Admiral Cornelis Tromp, since it focuses on his flagship the Golden Leeuw (Golden Lion).

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