Two Masted Ships at Sea

This Van de Velde sheet is from the collection of Pacetti of Rome, which consisted of 778 principally Italian drawings, in 103 volumes and portfolios. This sheet was then bought in 1844 by Dr. F. Waagen in Rome for the cabinet in Berlin. According to Thilhandeau, there was another sale with the rest of his collection in 1856 but the catalogue has not been found.

A collector of marines, 3000 drawings, mostly Dutch, Carl Winter (the former director of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) assembled the remarkable series of 600 sheets of the van de Veldes.

Willem Van de Velde’s training and early activity in Leiden and Amsterdam is not well documented, but he spent his entire working life drawing ships and small craft. His drawings provided him with the raw material for his grisailles (penschilderingen or “pen paintings” drawn in ink on a prepared white canvas or oak panel). He was constantly at sea with the Dutch fleet, sometimes as an independent observer, sometimes in an official capacity. He was present at the Battle of Scheveningen in 1653 and made drawings from the deck of his galliot (a small Dutch sailing vessel). He witnessed the Battle of the Sound in 1658, which is recorded in a grisaille (London, N. Mar. Mus.), and the defeat of the Dutch fleet at the Battle of Lowestoft in 1665. In 1666 he made a sequence of drawings recording every stage of the epic Four Days’ Battle off Dunkirk, with the approval and protection of Admiral de Ruyter.

For the next six years he was at home in Amsterdam working on his grisailles. On the outbreak of the Third Anglo-Dutch War in 1672 he rejoined the Dutch fleet and made on-the-spot drawings of the Battle of Sole Bay. His works are in museums in Amsterdam, Berlin, Djon, Dresden, Frederiksburg, The Hague, Haarlem, Copenhagen, Leiden, Lille, The British Museum, London and National Maritime Museum, The Louvre, The Pitti in Florence, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Weimer, and Windsor Castle.