Imaginary Inlet in Southern Arctic Waters in Summer

c. 1640 - c. 1650

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 56.3 cm × width 142.2 cm
outer size: depth 8.5 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature, with initials, bottom centre, on the side of the rowing boat: BP·

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: W. de Ridder / L. Nijkamp, RMA, 16 March 2006

Provenance

…; collection F. Poupe Serrane, Brussels; from whom, fl. 309, to the museum, 1910; on loan to the Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam, 1921-30

Object number: SK-A-2518

The artist

Bonaventura Peeters I (Antwerp 1614 - Hoboken 1652)

The land- and seascape artist, Bonaventura Peeters I, the younger brother of Gillis (see SK-A-834), was baptized on 23 July 1614 in the Antwerp Sint-Walburgiskerk, the son of Cornelis Peeters and Catherina van Eelen ‘en van beter famille’.¹ He became a master in the Antwerp guild of St Luke in 1634/35 (although he may have been active earlier)² and subsequently shared a studio with this brother. He remained in Antwerp until circa 1650, when because of a falling out with the Jesuits he moved with his younger brother and sister to Hoboken.³ There he died on 25 July 1652. His epitaph, erected by his younger brother, also a painter, described him as ‘een des wereldts wonderheide Zee-schilder en Poëet’.⁴ Peeters never married, and the few records that refer to him usually describe him in the company of one or other of his siblings. Like his elder brother, he seems to have remained at a distance from the life of the guild.

As is the case of his elder brother, there is no record of Bonaventura’s apprenticeship. It seems likely that he was taught in the northern Netherlands, possibly by Jan Porcellis (c. 1584-1632), active there from 1622, but previously in Antwerp where his work was collected.⁵ Two seascapes – known from a photograph and a reproduction, one signed ‘B.Petri’ and dated 1629⁶ (thus exceptionally early if by our Bonaventura) and the other signed and also dated 1629⁷ – seem northern Netherlandish in character, as does a landscape in the Brussels museum.⁸

Opinion differs as to whether the artist later travelled outside the southern Netherlands.⁹ His apparently weak constitution¹⁰ notwithstanding, evidence provided by his oeuvre suggests that he did, even allowing for his South American subjects being inventions at second hand. Views of Copenhagen,¹¹ Stockholm¹² and what is presumed to be Archangel,¹³ point to a voyage to northern waters. Views of the northern Netherlands suggest he travelled there (irrespective of his schooling),¹⁴ as do views, inter alia, of Dover,¹⁵ the island of Oléron,¹⁶ Monte Felix¹⁷ (Canary Isles) and San Sebastian¹⁸ suggest voyages south.

His only known commission was from Jacob Edelheer (1597-1657), the pensionary of the city of Antwerp, to execute scenes from the battle of Kallo (20 June 1638, not far distant from Antwerp) in 1638, followed by a larger picture of the battle, executed with this brother, for which they were paid in 1639. Peeters was quite prolific, and there are records of paintings dated in every year of his career.¹⁹ He also was a frequent contributor of figures to church interiors by Peeter Neeffs I (c. 1578-1656/61).²⁰

Two of his poems are inscribed on the reverse of sea-storms which he had executed in gouache.²¹

His portrait by Johannes Meyssens (1612-1670) was engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677). It was first published in Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime of 1649²² and then in Cornelis de Bie’s Het gulden cabinet of 1662.²³

REFERENCES
P. Rombouts and T. van Lerius, De Liggeren en andere historische archieven der Antwerpsche Sint Lucasgilde, ondere zinspreuk: ‘Wt Ionsten Versaemt’, 2 vols., Antwerp/The Hague 1864-76 (reprint Amsterdam 1961), II, pp. 59, 67, 133; F.J. van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Antwerpsche schilderschool, 3 vols., Antwerp 1883, p. 1046ff.

Entry

This is a seemingly early, painted evocation of the Arctic world, a region which had received great publicity following Gerrit de Veer’s illustrated, 1598 account of the voyage of Willem Barentsz, Jacob Heemskerk and Jan Cornelisz Rijp in 1596, in which Spitsbergen was discovered and Dutchmen overwintered for the first time in the Arctic (on Novaya Zemlya).²⁴ Detailed maps of the area were quickly published by Johannes van Doetecum (c. 1530-1605),²⁵ and there soon followed illustrated descriptions, both in English and Dutch, of other voyages to the region and feats of endurance including the Journael by Jacob van der Brugge of 1634.²⁶ Peeters does not here depict any ice, and the rocky peaks are snowless, so it would appear to be summer in the south of the region. Spitsbergen itself was treeless²⁷ and perhaps because a few trees can be made out in the present work, the 1934 museum catalogue described the locality with qualification as the Norwegian coast.

Whaling was vigorously pursued in Spitsbergen in the first half of the seventeenth century, first by several nations and then primarily by the Dutch.²⁸ Cornelis de Bie refers to Peeters’s whaling subjects.²⁹ Extant by him is a whale hunt in a private Norwegian collection.³⁰ Another showing a seemingly realistic whale hunt in which the hunters in rowing boats circle a harpooned whale was with the dealer Julius Weitzner, London, in 1931; its date has been read as 1645.³¹ A view by him, said to be of Archangel and certainly of a port in northern waters of 1644, in which is prominent a ship flying the Danish flag, is in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.³²

The scene in the Rijksmuseum picture, which is signed with Peeters’s initials, is not specific enough to be identifiable, and is only partially generic of what had been published about life in Arctic waters experienced during the whaling season in summer months. A single whale, not a school as would normally have been the case, is shown in the distance.³³ It is not being hunted. While Peeters has included the typical huts, or ‘tents’ as they were called,³⁴ none of the technology necessary for exploiting chiefly the whale blubber – furnaces, coppers, coolers and barrels – is depicted as is the case in Cornelis de Man’s painting of 1639 (SK-A-2355).³⁵ Confrontations with ‘white’ bears are a frequent subject of illustration in the pamphlets referred to above.³⁶ The Dutch man-of-war moored offshore would also have been an accepted occurrence, as warships were despatched to the area to protect Dutch whaling operations.

The present picture, executed perhaps in the 1640s, and Peeters’s other pictures of northern waters, were something of a novelty for a south Netherlandish artist to have undertaken. Whether he made a journey to the Arctic is debatable and is discussed above in his biography. His idiom seems to have been that of Adam Willaerts (1577-1664, active in Utrecht), though the latter’s coastal scenes were situated in lower latitudes.³⁷

Gregory Martin, 2022

Collection catalogues

1934, p. 220, no. 1847a (A Bearhunt on the coast of Norway?); 1976, p. 437, no. A 2518

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'Bonaventura (I) Peeters, Imaginary Inlet in Southern Arctic Waters in Summer, c. 1640 - c. 1650', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5019

(accessed 20 September 2024 18:42:49).