Amsterdam Harbor Scene

c. 1654/1655

Reinier Nooms, called Zeeman

Artist, Dutch, 1623 or 1624 - 1664

A sage-green harbor teems with more than a dozen sailing ships and rowboats under a pale gray sky in this horizontal painting. The horizon comes about one-fifth of the way up the composition, and dark gray and white clouds tower above. Light filters onto the scene through the clouds from our left to fall across the ships while casting shadows on the water nearest us. Painted in tones of slate gray and warm brown, most of the ships closest to us have their sails furled so the masts and horizontal yard arms bristle against the sky. The larger ships have cannons poking out of square portholes. On our right, a war ship floats with its ornately carved and gilded stern facing us. A flag flying from the tallest of the three masts has red, white, and green stripes. The artist painted his name on that flag, “R. Zeeman.” The ship is tied to a buoy with a length of rope, and an empty rowboat is tethered to the right side of the ship. A similar ship but with the sails hanging loosely is tied to a buoy just beyond this one. A row of pickets, like a fence, extends into the water behind these two ships. To our left, a rowboat full of men has pulled up alongside a partially sunken ship, its masts tilting toward us. A few people stand on two more ships nearby. A black temporary dock floats next to the leftmost ship here. A person mixes something that smokes on the platform, and another person stands on a board lifted halfway up the ship’s side, presumably working on a repair. Two women in another rowboat next to the floating dock lean over the side, washing clothes. Another fence encloses the harbor to our left, and a hut in the middle of the harbor is surrounded by a similar structure. Two rowboats closer to us are filled with men wearing tall hats and black or brown coats, and women wearing black bonnets and white shawls. More sailing ships and rowboats move back or around beyond the harbor, out to sea. Visible cracks cover the surface of the painting.

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Reinier Nooms, an Amsterdam painter and graphic artist also known as Reinier Zeeman (which means seaman), specialized in maritime subjects. His career coincided with the heyday of Dutch commercial and maritime power in the 17th century, and Amsterdam’s bustling harbor in the IJ estuary provided Nooms with much of his artistic inspiration.

The billowing clouds, fluttering flags, and slightly choppy waters give life to this engaging view of Amsterdam’s harbor. A warship and several merchant ships are tied up inside the breakwater for maintenance and repairs. A man on a temporary platform works on the hull of the three-master to the left of center, while his colleague tends to a vat of hot tar on a floating dock. Two women have tied their skiff to the dock to do laundry in the harbor’s waters.

This painting celebrates a powerful Amsterdam family and its link to an important warship owned by the city’s Admiralty. The castle depicted on the ship’s tafferel (the painted panel on the stern) identifies it as the Huis te Swieten, which was built in 1653 and captured by the English in 1665. The warship served as the flagship of Michiel de Ruyter, one of Holland’s greatest naval heroes, on three expeditions in the 1650s.

The Huis te Swieten was named after the country estate of burgomaster Cornelis Bicker (1592–1654), a wealthy merchant and a member of the most powerful family in Amsterdam in the 1650s. Cornelis’s brother Jan Bicker (1591–1653) operated a thriving shipbuilding enterprise on a newly reclaimed island off Amsterdam’s shoreline. Bicker’s Island, as it is still known today, was one of three islands created as part of the city’s expansion of 1610. In the mid-1650s Nooms made an etching of the shipyard on Bicker’s Island featuring a small guardhouse at one of the openings in the breakwater that protected the harbor. At the far left of Amsterdam Harbor Scene we see a similar guardhouse, which, based on cartographic evidence, was situated at another opening farther out along the breakwater. The etching, which positively identifies Bicker’s Island, and contemporary maps of Amsterdam confirm that Nooms painted this scene from the northeastern shore of Bicker’s Island, looking across the IJ.

The artist signed Amsterdam Harbor Scene as "R.Zeeman" upon its completion around 1658, embedding his coined name on the flag on the warship’s main mast. Coincidentally, Nooms accompanied De Ruyter on an expedition to the Mediterranean from 1661 to 1663.

On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 49

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Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on canvas

  • Credit Line

    The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund

  • Dimensions

    overall: 61 x 81.8 cm (24 x 32 3/16 in.)
    framed: 81.9 × 102.2 × 5.72 cm (32 1/4 × 40 1/4 × 2 1/4 in.)

  • Accession

    2011.3.1

More About this Artwork

Scholarly Article:  Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century: Amsterdam Harbor Scene, c. 1654/1655

This horizontal painting shows a group of eight light-skinned musicians and onlookers gathered closely around a rectangular, carpet-covered table. The front edge of the table runs parallel to the bottom edge of the painting, and seems close to us. Shown from about the waist up, the men and women’s vivid lapis-blue, coral-red, buttercup-yellow, lilac-purple, and moss-green garments fall in crisp folds. Bright reflections on the fabric suggest a satin-like material. Two women wear feathers in their hair and one man’s hat is plumed. One man, wearing crimson red and black, sits with his back to us to our left on the near side of the table. He holds the neck of a bass viol, about the size of a cello, with his left hand, and points to pages of an open music book with the bow in his right hand. The other people cluster on the far side of the table. A man to the left plays a violin; a woman at the center plays a guitar-sized bandora, and a woman to our right plays a lute. The musicians, along with a man who leans over the table from between the two women, look down at the music books. A young man behind the woman at the center holds up a glass of pale liquid with his right hand as he touches his left forefinger to his smiling lips. A man and woman stand close together in the background to our right, in the top right corner of the canvas.

Scholarly Series:  Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Probably commissioned by the Bicker family, Amsterdam.[1] Pieter Locquet [d. 1781]; (his estate sale, Amsterdam, 22-24 September 1783, no. 448); Mi[...]er.[2] Private collection, England; (sale, Bonhams, London, 12 September 2009, no. 82); (Johnny Van Haeften, Ltd., London); purchased 19 January 2011 by NGA.
[1] The painted panel on the stern of the warship in the painting bears an image of a castle, which identifies the ship as the Huis te Swieten, an important warship in the fleet of Amsterdam's Admiralty. The warship was named after Castle Swieten (or Zwieten), since 1632 the country estate of Cornelils Bicker (1592-1654), a member of the most powerful family in Amsterdam at the time. One of the four Bicker brothers--Andries (1586-1652), Jacob (1588-1647), Jan (1591-1653), and Cornelis--likely commissioned the painting from Nooms, who executed other paintings as well as engravings that included views of Bicker family property.
[2] A copy of the sale catalogue, annotated with buyers names and prices, is available on the Internet Archive: https://ia800800.us.archive.org/18/items/catalogusvaneenu00locq/catalogusvaneenu00locq.pdf (accessed 26 June 2017). The middle letters of the buyer's name are not clear.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

2018

  • Water, Wind, and Waves: Marine Paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2018, unnumbered brochure, fig. 5.

2021

  • Clouds, Ice, and Bounty: The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Collection of Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Paintings, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2021, no. 10, repro.

Bibliography

2011

  • Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr., and Daniëlle H.A.C. Lokin. Human Connections in the Age of Vermeer. Exh. cat. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art; Miyagi Museum of Art, Sendai; Bunkamura Museum of Art, Tokyo. London, 2011: 13, fig. 2.

  • Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr., and Daniëlle H.A.C. Lokin. Communication: Visualizing the Human Connection in the Age of Vermeer. Japanese ed. Exh. cat. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art; Miyagi Museum of Art, Sendai; Bunkamura Museum of Art, Tokyo. Tokyo, 2011: 20, fig. 2.

2012

  • Bruyn Kops-Rahusen, Henriette de. "De Thuishaven van de Familie Bicker." Maandblad Amstelodamum 1 (2012): 34-43, 35 fig. 1, 36 fig. 2 (detail), 38 fig. 5 (detail).

Inscriptions

center right on the flag: R.Zeeman

Wikidata ID

Q20177456

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