Object data
oil on panel
support: height 62.5 cm × width 122.1 cm
Adam Willaerts
Ships off a Rocky Coast
1621
Inscriptions
- signature and date, bottom centre: A. Willarts. ƒ 1621
Technical notes
The support consists of two oak planks with a horizontal grain and is bevelled on all sides. The ground is white. Traces of two types of underdrawing are visible with the naked eye. The first is a rapid but detailed underdrawing, executed in a dry medium, which is often not followed entirely in the paint layers. For example, two boats drawn in on the left, with many figures on and around them, were never executed in paint (fig. a). Two extra figures were added at bottom right. The direction of the flags on the ships was also changed in the painting. A second underdrawing, executed in thicker lines and a fluid medium, was made in several parts of the composition, such as the figures in the foreground (fig. b). They were followed quite carefully in paint. The paint layer is very fine and detailed, mostly carried out wet in wet and carefully worked up in details and mostly smooth; impasto was used only for the foam of the waves.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 13 December 2004
- infrared reflectography: I. Verslype, RMA, 13 December 2004
Literature scientific examination and reports
Korthals Altes/De Ridder 2006, pp. 388-95
Condition
Good. There are a few small losses, particularly along the edges. There is some lifting but stable paint at bottom left.
Conservation
- E. Bosshard, 1971: reverse impregnated; join glued; join filled and retouched; varnished
Provenance
...; sale, Henrik Jan Antony Raedt van Oldenbarnevelt (1828-1903, The Hague), L. Hardenberg and L. Schwaab, Amsterdam (F. Muller), 6 November 1900, no. 351, fl. 1,178.75, to the museum; on loan to the Mauritshuis, The Hague, since 2000
Object number: SK-A-1927
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Adam Willaerts (London 1577 - Utrecht 1664)
According to De Bie and Houbraken, Adam Willaerts was born in Antwerp, but recently discovered documents show that he was the son of a Flemish immigrant in London. The baptismal register of Austin Friars Church shows that he was baptized on 21 July 1577. The family probably moved to Amsterdam around 1589. In 1602, Adam Willaerts and Salomon Vredeman de Vries were commissioned to paint the organ shutters in Utrecht Cathedral. He became a citizen of Utrecht six years later, and it was around then that he painted his first known dated work, The Dutch East India Company Fleet near an Island off the Coast of West Africa, in 1608 or 1609.1
That Willaerts was an important figure among Utrecht artists is clear from his active involvement in founding the city’s Guild of St Luke in 1611, and from the fact that he served as its dean for many years. He was in regular touch with other Utrecht artists, such as Roelant Savery, Cornelis van Poelenburch, Herman Saftleven and Bernard Zwaerdecroon.
It can be deduced from the guild accounts that he taught a large number of ‘apprentice boys’. He was married and had six children, three of whom also became painters: Cornelis (?-1666), Abraham (c. 1613-69) and Isaac (c. 1620-93). Much of Willaerts’s oeuvre consists of marines and coastal landscapes. He also made seascapes featuring biblical figures. Willaerts regularly received specific commissions, among others from the burgomasters of Utrecht, the Dordrecht Chamber of Justice2 and the States of Utrecht (SK-A-1387). Through the artist Simon de Passe he also received a request from King Christian IV of Denmark to contribute to a series of paintings for Kronborg Castle. He also painted for the open market. Adam Willaerts died in 1664. His last known dated work, Shipwreck in a Violent Storm, is from 1656.3
Everhard Korthals Altes, 2007
References
De Bie 1661, pp. 111-12; Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), p. 176; Houbraken I, 1718, p. 60; Schulz in Thieme/Becker XXXVI, 1947, pp. 8-9; Muller 1880, pp. 92, 96, 98, 126; Bok in Amsterdam 1993, pp. 325-26; Giltaij in Rotterdam-Berlin 1996, p. 113; Briels 1997, pp. 407-08
Entry
Three English ships and a small galley are sailing the waters of a bay. In the foreground are a few fishermen, together with a woman selling fish to a bugler. Fish is also being sold on the right.
Adam Willaerts regularly made use of drawings by Roelant Savery, an artist who lived in Utrecht for a long time. In 1622 Willaerts stated that he visited Savery every day.4 Savery’s views of Prague and of the mountains and hills in the Alps and Bohemia may have been the source for the landscape on the right in this panel.5 In particular, Willaerts appears to have modelled the fortress on the mountain-top, which is actually the Hradcany in Prague, fairly close on a drawing by Savery.6 Strikingly, the dimensions of the fortress in the painting match those in Savery’s drawing. A similar castle appears in no fewer than nine paintings by Adam Willaerts or his son Abraham.7 The covered bridge on the right is also thought to be a realistic detail. Spicer has pointed out that most Dutch people would not have realized that these elements were to be found in Prague, and that the depiction of its castle on top of a cliff by the sea would probably not have been thought odd.8 According to her, Willaerts did not intend to paint a recognizable location.
Elsewhere Spicer has suggested that the panel may have been commissioned by art lovers from the circle around Frederick V of the Palatine, the so-called Winter King, and his queen, Elizabeth Stuart, who had fled, disillusioned, from Prague to the Dutch Republic in 1620, the year before the Rijksmuseum painting was made.9 Frederick himself owned several paintings by the Utrecht master.10 On the far left of the Rijksmuseum work are two small figures greeting each other with deep bows. A very attractive theory, but one that is difficult to prove, is that the real subject of the painting is the journey that Frederick V and Elizabeth made to England in 1613.11 The painting was perhaps intended to commemorate several important moments in Frederick’s life. If the painting was indeed commissioned, it is much more likely that the castle was a deliberate reference to Prague. In the year of this painting Willaerts also made a larger variant on canvas, and it too is signed and dated 1621.12 There are only minor differences between the two versions, the most striking being the larger number of foreground figures and the absence of the two gentlemen greeting each other on the left.
Everhard Korthals Altes, 2007
See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements
This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 345.
Literature
Bol 1973, pp. 77, 330, note 180; dealer cat. Hoogsteder/Naumann 1983, p. 115; Spicer 1997, pp. 23-43; Spicer in San Francisco etc. 1997, pp. 330-33, no. 66
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 300, no. 2683; 1934, p. 319, no. 2683; 1960, p. 342, no. 2683; 1976, p. 605, no. A 1927; 2007, no. 345
Citation
E. Korthals Altes, 2007, 'Adam Willaerts, Ships off a Rocky Coast, 1621', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6571
(accessed 26 November 2024 14:38:08).