In 1995 two paintings of seemingly distinct maritime events, Dutch Warship Attacking a Spanish Galley and Spanish Galleon Firing Its Cannons , were bequeathed to the National Gallery of Art from the estate of Dorothea Villard Hammond. Although the Dutch and Spanish warships depicted on these panels were barely visible under layers of old discolored varnish, dendrochronological analysis [see DendrochronologyA method of dating wood by examining the annual growth rings.] of the panels determined that they were, remarkably, two unequal halves of a larger work. Correspondences between the wood grain and between the cloud and wave patterns on the two segments provide evidence that Spanish Galleon Firing Its Cannons was the left part of the original panel and Dutch Warship Attacking a Spanish Galley was at the right. After removal of discolored varnish and careful inpainting of old losses, the two panels have now been framed together to reestablish the original painting’s continuous composition, under the title A Naval Encounter between Dutch and Spanish Warships.
In the slightly smaller panel on the right-hand side, a Dutch warship under full sail proudly flies an outsized red, white, and blue Dutch flag (on which the artist has signed his first name plus the initials of his last name). A solid red flag, signifying the ship’s intent to engage in combat, flies defiantly at its stern. The warship has already successfully attacked a small Spanish galley, which is sinking into the stormy sea. Whereas the Spanish boat is awash in misery, the Dutch ship is alive with triumphant activity, from the commander and trumpeter standing on the poop deck beneath the red flag to the sailors scurrying up the rigging and the soldiers reloading their muskets. As Spanish oars fly overhead from the impact of cannonballs, Dutch sharpshooters poised on the bow of their ship take no mercy as they fire down at their enemies. One Spanish soldier raises his hands in terror while another tries to leap over the ship’s gunwale into the sea. A Catholic penitent wearing an ocher-colored nazareno holds out a small crucifix as a sign of his faith, and a red-robed turbaned figure, perhaps a Moor wearing a djellaba, kneels on a piece of driftwood and pleads for his life.
The larger segment on the left-hand side features a Spanish galleon with its red royal standard flying from its main mast. As with the Dutch warship in the other panel, its deck is alive with armed soldiers, already fighting a partially hidden, much smaller Dutch warship close to its starboard side. Verbeeck articulated the rigging of these vessels with great clarity, and carefully depicted the gestures and brightly colored costumes of each crew member. Although he included a secondary vignette in the far distance, where a Dutch warship has set fire to a Spanish galley, his clear focus in both segments was on the large foreground ships.
The pictorial narrative of the reconstructed painting is vastly different from that gleaned by looking at the individual segments separately. This much enlarged painting reveals a significantly more intense naval engagement, with the Spanish galleon in combat with two Dutch warships, one close to its starboard side and the other to its stern. Even though the outcome of this battle remains uncertain, the secondary vignette in the distant left, where the Dutch ship is clearly victorious over a burning Spanish galley, would have given a Dutch patron assurance of a Dutch victory. The painting is not known to represent an actual event or even specific ships; nevertheless, Verbeeck almost certainly intended it to be a political metaphor for the victory of the Dutch over the Spanish.
Successes at sea against the Spanish were a matter of tremendous pride for the Dutch people. As is evident in a diagram made of Verbeeck’s original composition [fig. 3]
[fig. 3] Kristin Grubb, Diagram of Cornelis Verbeeck's A Naval Encounter between Dutch and Spanish Warships (Dutch Warship Attacking a Spanish Galley and Spanish Galleon Firing Its Cannons, Dutch ships were generally smaller than their Spanish counterparts but could sail closer to the wind and were more maneuverable in the treacherous shallows of river estuaries along the Dutch coast. Against seemingly overwhelming odds, the skilled commanders and seamen of these Dutch ships were able to defeat their heavily armed adversaries. To help combat this Dutch advantage, the Spanish would bring small Mediterranean-style galleys to the North Sea. While these vessels, which were propelled chiefly by oars, adapted easily to shifting wind conditions, they were too lightly armed to be effective against Dutch warships.
Verbeeck must have learned his trade, if not directly then by example, from the most important marine painter of the day, Hendrick Vroom (1566–1640). Vroom lived in Haarlem but received important public commissions from guilds and admiralties throughout the Netherlands. From this master Verbeeck derived his calligraphic manner of rendering the troughs and foamy crests of waves, and learned to portray specific ships and their rigging in remarkable detail. Nevertheless, Verbeeck’s artistic personality and the nature of his patronage were different from those of Vroom. The latter usually painted on a large scale and used a high vantage point to present the grand narrative sweep of important naval battles and historic events; by contrast, Verbeeck’s paintings are more modest in scale and focus on one or two ships rather than on a whole flotilla [fig. 4]
[fig. 4] Cornelis Verbeeck, Ships off the Coast, c. 1620, oil on panel, Frans Hals Museum , Haarlem. Furthermore, Verbeeck painted his marines with a much lower vantage point than did Vroom. As a consequence, in scenes such as this one, the human element—whether soldiers combating an enemy or confronting a raging storm or treacherous rocks—takes on enormous visual interest and pictorial significance.
Exactly when Verbeeck painted this marine battle scene is difficult to determine because he rarely dated his compositions. Nevertheless, the structure of the large Dutch warship, with its open gallery at the stern, and the weblike character of the rigging on the Spanish galleon suggest a date in the late 1610s. This dating is consistent with the costumes of the sailors and with the color of the Spanish flag, which was gradually changed from a red to a white field during the reign of King Philip III (1598–1621). The distinctive rhythms Verbeeck used to depict the crests of the waves also suggest a relatively early date in the artist’s career. In the 1620s he began to soften his manner of rendering water in response to the increased naturalism of marine painting in Haarlem. A dating of circa 1618/1620 is also consistent with information derived from dendrochronological examinations, which indicate that the oak panel supports were available for Verbeeck’s use after 1610.
Verbeeck’s original painting was probably cut down early in its history, long before the two parts were acquired in the 1880s by the renowned journalist and railroad magnate Henry Villard. National Gallery of Art frame conservator Richard Ford concluded that the profile of the black frames that surrounded the two individual panels and the manner in which they were built were consistent with seventeenth-century Dutch framing. One can only surmise that Verbeeck’s painting was divided in two because the large, horizontal composition (measuring 18 3/4 inches high by 55 3/4 inches wide) was difficult to fit into most seventeenth-century Dutch domestic settings.
The reconstruction of this work is important not only for the appreciation of Verbeeck’s artistic achievements but also for our understanding of early seventeenth-century images of dramatic naval encounters between the Dutch and their adversaries. These skirmishes and outright battles were fought by valiant seamen maneuvering their formidable ships into combat with canons blazing. Verbeeck, who generally worked for private patrons, probably made this painting for a collector from Hoorn, as the red and yellow striped flag flying from the mizzenmast of the Dutch warship is the flag of that port city. This vivid image would have reminded its owner of the travails and the valor of those seamen who helped free the Dutch from the oppression of the Spanish yoke. The billowing sails, complex rigging, and brilliantly colored flags of these great ships as they fired upon each other presented an unmatched visual spectacle; victor and vanquished were there for all to see.
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.
April 24, 2014
