Van de Velde Ship-Painting Show: Great Art

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE

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fter writing about the work of living artists the past two or three weeks, Mary Quant excepted, though she only just died, I’m looking today at two very dead ones.

And after visiting Mass MoCA in the hills where landlubbers dwell, we’re heading out to sea. The Van de Veldes: Greenwich, Art and the Sea is the wonderful, rousing new exhibition at the Queen’s House in Greenwich, just outside London. There, the meridian line rules and the Cutty Sark is moored. It’s where kings and queens were born and lived, the Navy trained its best officers, and the National Maritime Museum educates and inspires.

Willem van de Velde the Elder (1611–1693) and his son, Willem the Younger (1633–1707) might have been born Dutch, but they became Britain’s eminent ship and sea-battle painters. Father and son invented the genre of English maritime painting. Turner said he wouldn’t — and couldn’t — have been the artist he was without them.

The National Maritime Museum owns the world’s biggest and best collection of Van de Velde paintings and drawings. The exhibition surveys their work and careers and situates them in times of stormy seas as Charles II, James II, William and Mary, and the Glorious Revolution came and went.

From stem to stern, it’s a great show, with nary a listless moment.

Surprises come out of the blue, as Yogi Berra might have said, and in this case out of the Deep Blue Sea. I hadn’t been to Greenwich in 30 years. When I visited the newly expanded and redone National Portrait Gallery, I fastened on Restoration portraits. From Protestant Roundhead stock, I didn’t know as much about the Restoration in 1660 — the end of the Cromwell era and return of the monarchy — and the Glorious Revolution in 1688, when James II got the Protestant boot.

And who knew the Dutch were so belligerent and crafty? Today, the smell and haze of pot obscure their history of wars at sea with the Brits, with key battles captured by the two Willems. Off to Greenwich I went.

The Van de Veldes starts with a shot across the bow — a warning that we’re about to see a show of substance as well as battle scenes on the order of cinema vérité. It’s The Burning of the Royal James at the Battle of Solebay, 28 May 1672, a massive tapestry made between 1678 and 1688 based on the Elder’s drawings and design. I’d never heard of the battle, the first in the Third Anglo-Dutch War, which I didn’t know about either, but I was there to look and learn. A fleet of 75 ships and 20,000 men with cannons a-boomin’ ambushed an English and French fleet anchored in Suffolk. The Elder, though Dutch, had been hired as a war artist — he witnessed and recorded the frenzy.

The battle was a draw. On the one hand, the Dutch stalled a planned English and French invasion. On the other, the English promoted it as a show of English heroism in the face of treachery. This might seem like a stretch since the tapestry depicts the destruction of the Royal James, an English flagship, but it did the trick. The Burning of the Royal James works today because of its mammoth size, meticulous detail, and vignettes of sailors flailing in the water. It’s a documentary and, in English art, something new. For us today, it’s a bracing, moving introduction to the show. The tapestry has just been fully conserved. A wall panel next to it describes the restoration project.

The first mention of the Van de Veldes in England dates to 1674, when the keeper of the king’s Greenwich palace asked for space to be reserved in the Queen’s House for a studio for the Elder and the Younger to work on what would be their first royal commission.

Father and son were born in Leiden, possibly into a family of painters, and we know the Elder was painting ships by 1640. Years later, Charles II was keen on both besting the Dutch in the race for global trade and creating an iconography for the navy he hoped would become the world’s most formidable. By the 1660s, the Elder and the Younger were working for the Dutch navy as marine artists, getting their own small boat to follow the fleet, even coming close in watery battlefields.

By the early 1670s, though, they were in England, for reasons that were more pecuniary than political. Blockades, wartime inflation, and a depression had killed the Dutch art market. In England, there wasn’t much of a base of native ship painters or seascapists. Charles II, hearing about Dutch artists circling the drain, put out a “Come to England” sign. The Van de Veldes found an unfilled niche.

Daddy Van de V seems to have had a randy side. Around 1572, his wife discovered he was having flings with other women. Any port in a storm, he thought, by speedboat if possible.

The Van de Veldes is expertly paced. A portrait gallery introduces us to the main players. Charles II returned in 1660, after spending a big chunk of his nine-year exile in the Netherlands. The Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale seem to have introduced the Van de Veldes to the king. The two painters were involved in the decoration of Ham House, the Lauderdales’ country house outside London. There are also dashing portraits of the bewigged Van de Veldes, father and son.

The Elder and Younger worked in tandem. The father was well known for his pen paintings — large, detailed pen drawings so dense with imagery that the medium seems to cover the surface like paint covers the canvas in a painting. The Younger was fluent in oil painting and in uniting ships, sea, and weather into a whole that could be calm or tempestuous.

A group of the Elder’s pen paintings are on display. Van de Velde started with a canvas or panel he painstakingly primed with layer upon layer of chalk-colored paint so thick that the surface could tolerate a range of pens, some sharp, many layers of ink, and lots of pencil. A painting made from colored pigment can distract from a battle’s force and violence, but, as in the movies, black-and-white develops essentials. They’re very powerful.

A Royal Visit to the Fleet in the Thames Estuary, 1672, painted in about 1674, is one of the Younger’s first court paintings. Charles II isn’t physically depicted but we know he’s there, probably below deck, because the royal standard flies from one of the ships while, on the ship next to it, sailors lower the royal standard, telling us that Charles has just disembarked. The scene’s low viewpoint makes us feel we’re there. The picture has just been cleaned, with lots of goopy, old varnish removed, so it sparkles. It has kept its original silvered frame, too.

One of the things I like the most about this show is its development of the Van de Veldes as both artists and journalists. The father especially was a genius at reportage. We get details and crisp close-ups as well as a bird’s-eye view of a battle’s entirety. Elder’s pen paintings are big. Battles seem biblical, massive and hot enough to persuade us that the fate of the world is at stake, yet they’re filled with such individual battles as a sailor flailing in the water.

The Royal Museums Greenwich own about 1,200 drawings by both Van de Veldes. Together, Elder and Younger produced more than 2,500 drawings. These are to be seen less as inventory and more as a library central to their studio business. The pair worked not only for the court but for private patrons commissioning portraits of ships they owned, famous ships, or ships in seascapes. A section on how the Younger used drawings in his painting practice is instructive.

The Van de Veldes broadens in galleries treating English maritime art after the death of Charles II in 1686. There’s a grand bust portrait of James II by Nicolas de Largillière. He looks more fop than divinely anointed king. The Van de Veldes transitioned to his patronage and, after the 1688 revolution, to William and Mary’s.

In 1677, the Younger painted The Departure of William of Orange and Princess Mary for Holland, November 1677. The Duke of York, later James II, engineered the marriage — Mary was his daughter — as a hedge against Dutch plots to overthrow him upon his becoming king, which he did when his brother, Charles II, died in 1685. No such luck. In 1689, the Younger painted Mary’s yacht as it arrived in England, after James was deposed, so she could take the throne as queen. Both pictures have a happy pastel palette of rose and robin’s-egg blue.

There’s a gallery on English cabinets of curiosities, which, by the late 1600s were heavy on maritime art, and another gallery on yacht design. Van der Velde the Younger was rich enough to own a yacht that he designed, and yacht design became part of their business.

By the time the Elder died in 1693, his son was in the business of painting not real battles, which are political paintings, but imagined ones where the theme is Sturm und Drang. An English Ship at Sea Lying-To in a Gale is about drama, not history or documentary. It’s a disaster picture and foretells Turner but also the Titanic movie.

The exhibition ends on two clever, smart notes. It re-creates the look of the Van de Velde studio, which was, for years, in the Queen’s House. The royal museum system in Greenwich is angling for young audiences. It’s incorporating contemporary art in its buildings when it makes sense. Tania Kovats’s Sea Mark, from 2014, fills a big, prominent wall with hand-painted tiles evoking the ripples of a calm sea as it recedes into the horizon. It’s immersive, as are Van de Velde paintings, but no one’s drowning. It’s hypnotic and a lovely addition.

The Van de Veldes is first-rate. The curators never go overboard with fad topics. There’s one reference to slavery and colonialism, at the very end. Neither Elder’s nor Younger’s ships figured in either. The battles occurred in a tiny slice of the North Sea. And the curators seem to have worked with gusto. This isn’t only a technical show, though admirals and shipbuilders would find much to love. It’s that and a history show, a feast of art, and so immersive that a whiff of salt air is easy to imagine.

The only quibble I have is the lack of a catalogue. There are lots of good studies on the Van de Veldes. The labels are meaty. That said, when a bookless exhibition closes, it evaporates, however much we loved it.

I’d never been to the Queen’s House, designed by Inigo Jones, started by Queen Anne of Denmark, James I’s consort, in 1610 and finished a generation later with the patronage of Queen Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s wife. It’s Britain’s first Palladian house. Jones had just returned from a long visit to Italy, where he studied elegant, classically proportioned buildings designed by Andrea Palladio in Venice and Vicenza.

In England, royal and ducal houses were still built in Tudor brick style with half-timbered passages, leaded windows, and structural mullions and transoms. The Queen’s House — harmonious, restrained, white, and with the fabulous, wrought-iron Tulip Staircase, Britain’s first unsupported and spiral staircase — would have been radical architecture.

The two queens wanted to use the house to display things from the royal art collection. It did then and does now. The Armada Portrait, from 1588, is there. It’s a three-quarter-length portrait of Elizabeth I painted the year that “the Protestant wind” scuppered both the Spanish fleet and Spanish lust for world domination. Elizabeth is dressed to the nines in a dress embroidered in gold with jewels fixed to the fabric. She holds a feathered fan in one hand — she’s a cool cat — and rests the other on a globe as if to suggest “mine, mine, mine.” Two vignettes are embedded in the background, one showing the English fleet about to pounce, the other showing the Spanish fleet in tatters.

In a nice and nasty touch, Elizabeth is wearing pearls she bought from the estate sale of goods that had belonged to Mary, Queen of Scots.

Holbein’s Portrait of Henry VIII, from the 1540s, is commanding, and The Somerset House Conference, 19 August, 1604, is a seminal history painting, though it’s a tiny bit primitive. It’s thought to be a copy by Juan Pantoja de la Cruz of the original painting in the National Portrait Gallery, by an unidentified artist. It depicts the English and Spanish negotiators who ended a brutal 20-year war between the two countries. The Queen’s House is chockablock with portraits of admirals as well, all impressively arranged.

I’d say flying colors all around. And, landlubber that I might be, I’ve used a dozen nautical terms in this story. My late father was a veteran of the submarine service in the Second World War, my late father-in-law a Navy commander. They’d both be footloose with pride.