Ships off a Rocky Coast

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.

Korthals Altes/De Ridder 2006, pp. 388-95

Good. There are a few small losses, particularly along the edges. There is some lifting but stable paint at bottom left.

...; 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

ObjectNumber: SK-A-1927

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.⁴⁴Spicer in San Francisco etc. 1997, pp. 332, 390. 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.⁵⁵Spicer 1997, pp. 30-32. 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.⁶⁶Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Art Museum; illustrated in Spicer 1997, p. 32. 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.⁷⁷Spicer 1997, pp. 32-39. 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.⁸⁸Spicer 1997, p. 32. 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.⁹⁹Spicer in San Francisco etc. 1997, p. 332. Frederick himself owned several paintings by the Utrecht master.¹⁰¹⁰Hoogsteder 1986, I, pp. 223-25. 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 1613.¹¹¹¹Cf. dealer cat. Hoogsteder/Naumann 1983, p. 115; Spicer in San Francisco etc. 1997, p. 332. 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 1621.¹²¹²Private collection, 103.5 x 179.5 cm; illustrated in Briels 1997, pp. 182-83, fig. 276. 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.

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

1903, p. 300, no. 2683; 1934, p. 319, no. 2683; 1960, p. 342, no. 2683; 1976, p. 605, no. A 1927; 2007, no. 345

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