Ships in a Gale is one of Van de Velde's early, and excellently preserved, masterpieces, a work filled with the drama of ships struggling to avoid menacing rocks in a storm-tossed sea. ^[1] A fierce wind howling across the sky and whipping the water has created huge white-capped waves that relentlessly buffet two sailing ships, one flying a Dutch flag and the other an English flag. Their crews, having taken down the ships’ upper masts and furled their sails, desperately try to ride out the storm.

The English ship to the right is in a particularly perilous state. Not only is it dangerously close to the looming, angular rocks rising from the deep, but it also flounders broadside to waves that crash violently over its gunwales. A mainsail has come unfurled and flaps wildly in the wind. Human tragedy seems imminent, particularly for the sailor who hangs precariously over the waves from a line attached to the bowsprit. In the foreground victims of the storm try desperately to save themselves. Some row through the turbulent surf in a small dinghy, while one sailor swims toward a large rock onto which two of his companions have already managed to scramble.

Van de Velde enhanced the physical and emotional drama of this scene with his fluid brushwork, cool palette, and focused light effects. Cold, steel-gray clouds seem to move before one’s eyes, flowing diagonally across the sky, their dark thick forms at once overlapping and merging with lighter cloud masses. Pockets of light stream down on the foaming whitecaps, boats, and rocks below, accentuating and enlivening their forms. With great pictorial sensitivity Van de Velde juxtaposed the English ship against dark clouds while silhouetting the Dutch ship against a lighter and calmer portion of the sky.

Vlieger, Simon de, with whom Van de Velde studied for about two years around 1650, greatly influenced the artist’s compositional ideas with his depictions of ships in distress in stormy seas near rocky coasts ^[fig1]. ^[2] De Vlieger’s paintings, however, are more tonal in character and do not have the dramatic light effects that give Van de Velde’s painting such poignancy. Van de Velde’s ships and the ways they move in the water, moreover, are remarkably accurate, the result of the thorough training he received in the workshop of his father, Velde, Willem van de, the Elder.

Rocky coastlines do not exist in the Netherlands, and, aside from the inherent drama of ships floundering in storms near huge outcroppings, such scenes generally alluded to the danger of sailing in foreign seas. Paintings of ships in distress, moreover, often had allegorical associations referring to the uncertainties of human existence. ^[3] While Van de Velde’s painting would fit within this iconographic tradition, the concurrence of a Dutch and an English ship raises the possibility that this work alludes to an actual maritime event that took place during the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654), when a four-day storm in the Gulf of Lyon in December 1653 caused the shipwrecks of a squadron of Dutch vessels and their English prizes. ^[4] In the mid-1680s Van de Velde depicted this maritime disaster in a comparable painting of English and Dutch ships thrashing along a rocky coast. ^[5] Unlike the latter work, none of the ships in the National Gallery of Art painting can be specifically identified, but it seems probable that the same incident served as the inspiration for both scenes.

The painting is executed on a thin, oak panel[1] consisting of three boards with horizontal grain, which are joined horizontally. The top plank is thicker than the other two making up the support. The reverse of the panel is beveled at the edges. The panel was prepared for painting with a medium thick, creamy white ground layer. A brown imprimatura exists beneath the water. In general the painting was executed in thin layers of paint with little texture. The paint in the sky was applied with a relatively large brush. The boats were executed in a more exacting fashion with smaller brushes. The highlights are generally executed with thicker paint showing low impasto.

The X-radiographs show many changes including several sailboats that are much larger in scale than the current boats, as well as some figures and a different sky.

The condition of the painting is excellent. Inpainting scattered throughout the composition seems to cover slight stains, wood grain, and tiny losses. The inpainting is concentrated along the edges and the upper join. The varnish is even and fairly clear.

[1] The characterization of the wood is based on visual examination only.