CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

Built in 1879, Kaispeicher B is the oldest preserved warehouse building in Hamburg and has been home to the world’s largest private maritime collection since 2008. The collection originated from the collecting activities of the late Peter Tamm (1928-2016), who acquired thousands of ship models, construction plans, historical maps, nautical instruments and fine art over many decades. What was initially a private passion developed into the Scientific Institute for Maritime and Naval History, which eventually became a foundation that today runs the International Maritime Museum Hamburg.

In the wider aim of capturing and displaying maritime history, paintings played an important role from the outset. The collection comprises around 7,000 works of fine art from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. Seventeenth-century Dutch paintings occupy a special place (see fig. 1), since the vast majority of the collection dates from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and even the eighteenth century is is represented by only a few works. Dutch paintings greatly illuminate our understanding of British and German marine painting of later periods. The British school of marine painting was significantly influenced by the highly specialized Dutch painters who went to London in the late seventeenth century, when the British capital had a stronger art market than the Netherlands. As for the German marine painting of the Düsseldorf School: it took a form that would have been unthinkable without its Dutch predecessors. On the one hand, the works of the Old Masters were quoted compositionally, and on the other, German painters such as Andreas Achenbach (1815-1910) made frequent journeys to the Dutch coast to study the lives of seafaring communities.

The collection includes works by Jan Abrahamsz. Beerstraten (1622-1666), Jan Theunisz. Blanckerhoff (1628-1669), Adriaen van Diest (1655-1704), Allart van Everdingen (1621-1675), Pieter Mulier the Elder (ca. 1600-1659), Reinier Nooms, called “Zeeman” (ca. 1623-1664), Cornelis de Man (1621-1706), Abraham Storck (1644-1708), Pieter van der Croos (ca. 1610-1670), Cornelis van de Velde (1674-1714), Willem van de Velde the Elder (ca. 1610-1693), Willem van de Velde the Younger (1633-1707), Adam Willaerts (1577-1664), and Isaac Willaerts (ca. 1620-93).

The majority of the paintings were purchased from British and American galleries and auction houses in the 1970s and 1980s. It is noteworthy that the collection was not built up with the intention of eventually furnishing a museum. In Tamm’s words, “Just as science draws essential insights from pictorial representations, as an amateur historian I not only collect my favorite painters, but also try to make the history of seafaring over several centuries comprehensible using the example of as many artists as possible.” By the time these remarks were published, the collection represented far more than the fruits of a private collector’s passion and its sheer size placed it beyond the capacity of personal management. Tamm mused: “Artistic rank, historical and technical content, the artists’ biographies – my collection … is conceived within this triangle.”

Most of the paintings on display are of historical or technical interest. The Dutch paintings stand out as displaying the earliest evidence of social developments, far removed from major political events. The acquisition history reveals a growing interest in seascapes under the influence of landscape painting. A case in point is Allart van Everdingen’s Small Cargo Vessel (fig. 2), which he painted in his characteristic palette, developed during a Scandinavian journey that proved a fount of inspiration. The images of prominently staged ships that had dominated the collection thus far now competed, as it were, with the subtle study of weather and atmosphere as displayed in Dutch seascapes.

A coastal view by Jan Blanckerhoff (fig. 3) plays a key role in the collection. This is because compositions of this kind were highly recognizable reference points for the Düsseldorf school of painters around Andreas Achenbach (1815-1910), whose works feature prominently in the museum. Gerlinde de Beer sees Blanckerhoff as an important and woefully underrated painter: “The question arises as to why Blanckerhoff was forgotten during the Rembrandt Renaissance at the end of the last century, which led to a high valuation of Ruisdael and Allart van Everdingen. For immediately after these two, Blanckerhoff has a place with regard to his independent pictorial inventions, their atmospheric world and the quality of his painting technique.”¹

One of the finest works in the picture gallery is Reinier Nooms’s Fishermen Drawing in a Net (fig. 4). The artist’s meticulous observation of nature combines with his wonderfully atmospheric rendering of natural phenomena in this small masterpiece. The prominent compositional role of the clouds recurs in other paintings by Nooms. While this artist specialized mainly in the technical details of ships, here he shines outstandingly as a landscape painter. Nooms was presumably influenced by Willem van de Velde the Elder, whose paintings span the collection’s two main worlds: the artistic depiction of ships versus the more technical images of their construction (fig. 5). HMS Charles was one of the largest ships of its time. Van de Velde made frequent drawings of it from different vantage points so that he would be able to incorporate it into paintings in whatever orientation was required.² The drawing that is currently on display in the museum’s “Treasure Chamber” plays a key role in forging ties between different approaches, since many of the visitors whose main interest is in technical aspects find themselves fascinated by the artistic study of the ships.

In recent years, some of the original attributions have been challenged. This applies in particular to seascapes of the 1620s and 1630s that were executed in a monochrome style. In the twentieth century, these paintings were attributed across the board to Jan Porcellis (ca. 1584-1632). This can certainly be explained by the limited state of research at the time, especially since John Walsh’s catalogue raisonné unfortunately remained unpublished.³  Recent dendrochronological analysis has confirmed the hypothesis that one of the museum’s paintings that Friedrich Winkler had attributed to Jan Porcellis should in fact be attributed to Pieter Mulier the Elder (fig. 6).⁴ The fact that Mulier never signed his paintings with his surname makes it difficult to attribute them to him. However, many of them depict a fisherman hauling in a net at the stern of a boat, as here. Jeroen Giltaij surmises that this is “a kind of signature of the master.”⁵ Although it is a little disheartening to conclude that there is no work by the influential Porcellis in the collection, the discovery has a silver lining: Mulier was an important influence on Van Everdingen (indeed, he may even have trained him). This means that two paintings that hang close together in the gallery now come together on a different level of meaning.

For many years, the body of research on Dutch marine painting rested on the monograph by Laurens Bol.⁶ Fortunately, this genre has attracted a growing number of studies in recent years. The Maritime Museum also benefits from interdisciplinary research approaches, which are particularly important given the multifaceted objects in the collection. For example, new insights into shipbuilding can be translated into a dialogue between historical ship models and paintings or drawings that depict those same ships. With the forthcoming publication of an online catalogue of the paintings and the preparatory research for the gallery’s facelift, the museum aims to scale up its contribution to research. The aim of the changes to the interior is not only to produce a more atmospheric presentation, but also to place the paintings in new relationships to one another – for instance, drawing on the now clarified questions of attribution. We are better able to classify the works, using dendrochronological examination and technological analyses of the paint layer. But aside from attributions we want to look at other topics, such as the great variety in the coloristic design of depictions of water and the pigments used for it.

Part of the redesign has already been implemented in the area of Dutch painting and is to be extended to the other areas of the European marine painting collection in the medium term. Another focus of the new hanging is on the frames, almost all of which date from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We plan to replace the gold-colored decorative frames with simple moldings, to come as far as possible to the original appearance. The seascapes produced in the tonalist period, in particular, will benefit enormously from the new harmony between motif and frame. At the moment, some areas of the gallery still project an impression largely dominated by the ensemble of paintings. The aim is to change this to allow a stronger focus on the individual object. Instead of the white walls across the entire floor that we have at present, we will introduce an atmospheric, colorful design, together with more selective lighting. The reshaping of the area for Dutch painting shows us that the works now visually “approach” the visitor. Ultimately, it is important for us to correct the popular but false notion that the seascapes all share a certain uniformity. The diversity of the collection of the International Maritime Museum means that many of its visitors do not have a particular affinity for art. That means it is important to build bridges. For instance, a contemporary exhibit, with elements that are in places visually intriguing, is sure to catch the attention of many visitors who have come to see a different part of the collection. At the same time, our research efforts must also serve those who want to focus on our paintings with professional expertise.

Patrick Rivière is Curator of the Paintings Collection at the International Maritime Museum in Hamburg. He has been a member of CODART since 2024.

Notes

¹ Gerlinde de Beer, Ludolf Backhuysen (1630-1708): Sein Leben und Werk, Zwolle 2002, p. 184.

² Cf. Friso Lammertse, “Embedded Journalist“ of Naval Battles: Willem van de Velde I, in Ulrike Gehring et al., Mapping Spaces: Network of Knowledge in the 17th Century Dutch Landscape Painting (Exhibition catalogue Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe), Munich 2014, pp. 186-195, p. 191.

³ John Joseph Walsh, Jan and Julius Porcellis: Dutch Marine Painters, Columbia University, 1971. The main results of his dissertation were published in the Burlington Magazine: “The Dutch Marine Painters Jan and Julius Porcellis—1: Jan’s Early Career,” vol. 116, no. 860 (Nov. 1974), pp. 653-662 and The Dutch Marine Painters Jan and Julius Porcellis—II: Jan’s Maturity and ‘de jonge Porcellis’, vol. 116, no. 861 (Dec. 1974), pp. 734-743+745; A new catalogue raisonné on Jan Porcellis is to be published by Gerlinde de Beer.

⁴ Special thanks go to Gerlinde de Beer for her expert suggestions.

⁵ Jeroen Giltaij, Stürmische See (Cat. 48), in Giltaij et al., Herren der Meere, Meister der Kunst: Das holländische Seebild im 17. Jahrhundert (Exhibition catalogue Museum Boijmans van Beuningen; Gemäldegalerie im Bodemuseum), Rotterdam/Berlin 1996, pp. 236-37, p. 236.

⁶ Laurens Bol, Die holländische Marinemalerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, Braunschweig 1973.