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Willem van de Velde The Younger (1633-1707)
Battle at sea. Canvas, 85 × 110 cm.

The Netherlands Office for Fine Arts, inv.nr.NK 2367 (on loan to Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum). From the D. Katz gallery, Dieren, and the Silang collection, Amsterdam. During the war in Hitler's collection.

Willem van de Velde the younger was the son of a prominent painter of seascapes, who specialized in black-and-white 'pen paintings.' (They are actually more like brush drawings on the scale of paintings.) The father of the elder van de Velde was a skipper and soldier, so fighting and the sea were in their blood.

Alfred von Wurzbach remarked of our painter: 'A ship, to him, was as a human sitter to a portraitist: an animate creature with countless identifying features and distinctions.' His career began around the time of the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652-1654), when he accompanied his father aboard admiralty men-o'-war to immortalize engagements at sea for the States General. In the naval battles of the 1670s between the Republic and England, the van de Veldes were to be found aboard British vessels, in his majesty's service.

In our painting a Dutch ship with the arms of Haarlem on the stern is engaged with a French vessel flying a blue flag with a madonna. On the left, behind a burning French man-o'-war, is the Dutch flagship, identified by the arms of Holland. This would seem to indicate a date in 1673, when the Dutch were at war with the French on land and with the French and English at sea. However, by 1672 at the latest Willem van de Velde the Younger had moved to London, which makes it difficult to date the painting.

Wurzbach, vol.2, pp.755-757. MacLaren 1960, p. 420.