An English Warship Firing a Salute

1673

Willem van de Velde the Younger

Painter, Dutch, 1633 - 1707

A three-masted warship against a sky piled with clouds fills most of the right half of this vertical painting. The cream-white sails are bright in the sunlight, and tiny deckhands work along the horizontal yards and along the rigging. The flat stern faces us and is decorated with a rearing lion and unicorn on either side of a shield among gold molding. Eight hatches along the port side of the ship are lifted, and smoke shoots out of one of the cannons poking through the openings. Six men row a boat carrying seven more men to the left. A large flag fluttering from the stern has a red and white cross on a blue field. A single-masted sailboat with its red sail furled has pulled up to the stern of the warship, and three people work there. Another warship with sails partially raised floats in the hazy background to the left. The horizon comes about a quarter of the way up the composition, and clouds shaded with muted peach and lavender-tinted gray fill the sky along the horizon and break along the top third of the painting. Minuscule in scale, two white and black birds fly low to the water near the lower right corner of the painting. The artist signed and dated the painting as if he had inscribed a piece of driftwood near the birds: “W. V Velde In Londen 1673.”

Media Options

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On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 50-B


Artwork overview


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

William D. Stuart, at least in 1857.[1] Mrs. P.A. Chamier; (sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 10 April 1981, no. 74). Dr. F. Zoellner, Risch, Switzerland;[2] (sale, Sotheby's, London, 16 December 1999, no. 28); (Richard Green, London); private collection, United Kingdom; sold February 2018 through (Johnny Van Haeften, Ltd., London) to NGA.
[1] Stuart lent the painting to an 1857 exhibition at the British Institution.
[2] The 1999 Sotheby's sale catalogue describes the painting as "from the Estate of the late" Dr. Zoellner.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1857

  • British Institution, London, 1857, no. 167, as The Morning Gun.

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. 21, repro.

Bibliography

1990

  • Robinson, Michael Strang. Van de Velde: A Catalogue of the Paintings of the Elder and the Younger Willem van de Velde. 2 vols. Greenwich, 1990: 2:638-640, no. 348[2].

Inscriptions

Lower right: W. V Velde In Londen 1673

Wikidata ID

Q58691076


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