_Willem van de Velde_ (Dutch: 1633-1707).
William Van de Velde, the younger, was the son of an artist
of the same name, and the two together were the most famous
sea-painters of their time. The father was specially
commissioned by the East India Company to paint several of
their ships. The son was for a time engaged in painting the
chief naval battles of the Dutch. In 1675 they were both
established in England, living at Greenwich, as painters
to King Charles II., who granted each of them a pension of
£100 a year; the father "for taking and making draughts of
sea-fights"; and the son "for putting the said draughts into
colours." The Vandeveldes, thus employed, "produced," says
Macaulay, "for the king and his nobles some of the finest
sea-pieces in the world." "The palm," says Walpole, "is not
less disputed with Raphael for history than with Vandevelde
for sea-pieces." But in no branch of art has the English
School of this century made more conspicuous advance than in
sea-painting, and those who are fresh from reminiscences of
Turner or Lee, or, amongst later artists, of Hook and Moore
and Brett, will hardly be inclined to agree at this day with
such high praise of Vandevelde. "It is not easily understood,"
says Ruskin, "considering how many there are who love the sea,
and look at it, that Vandevelde and such others should be
tolerated. Foam appears to me to curdle and cream on the wave
sides, and to fly flashing from their crests, and not to be
set astride upon them like a peruke; and waves appear to me to
fall, and plunge, and toss, and nod, and crash over, and not
to curl up like shavings; and water appears to me, when it is
grey, to have the grey of stormy air mixed with its own deep,
heavy, thunderous, threatening blue, and not the grey of the
first coat of cheap paint on a deal floor."
"It is not easy to understand," perhaps, but two helps towards
understanding may be mentioned in Ruskin's own words. First,
previous painters--including even the Venetians, sea-folk
though they were--had all treated the sea conventionally.
Vandevelde and his fellows, at any rate, endeavoured to study
it from nature. Bakhuizen, as we shall see, like Turner
after him, used to go to sea in all weathers, the better to
obtain "impressions." Hence the Dutch sea-painting did mark
an advance, and how great was its influence on later artists
and sea-lovers we know from the case of Turner, who "painted
many pictures in the manner of Vandevelde, and always painted
the sea too grey, and too opaque, in consequence of his early
study of him." And this grey and opaque rendering of the sea by
the Dutch was to some extent due to natural causes. "Although
in artistical qualities lower than is easily by language
expressible, the Italian marine painting usually conveys an
idea of three facts about the sea,--that it is green, that
it is deep, and that the sun shines on it. The dark plain
which stands for far-away Adriatic with the Venetians, and
the glinting swells of tamed wave which lap about the quays
of Claude, agree in giving the general impression that the
ocean consists of pure water, and is open to the pure sky. But
the Dutch painters, while they attained considerably greater
dexterity than the Italian in mere delineation of nautical
incident, were by nature precluded from ever becoming aware of
these common facts; and having, in reality, never in all their
lives seen the sea, but only a shallow mixture of sea-water
and sand; and also never in all their lives seen the sky, but
only a lower element between them and it, composed of marsh
exhalation and fog-bank,--they are not to be with too great
severity reproached for the dulness of their records of the
nautical enterprise of Holland. _We_ only are to be reproached,
who, familiar with the Atlantic, are yet ready to accept with
faith, as types of sea, the small waves _en papillote_ and
peruke-like puffs of farinaceous foam, which were the delight
of Bakhuizen and his compeers"[97] (_Modern Painters_, vol. i.
pt. ii. sec. v. ch. i. § 20; vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. xviii. § 30;
_On the Old Road_, i. 283; _Harbours of England_, p. 18). The
storms of Van der Velde are certainly unattractive, but the
silvery daylight of his "calms at sea" gives to many of his
works an enduring charm. This painter is well represented both
in the Dulwich Gallery and in the Wallace collection.