Getting started with the collection:
Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom
The Return to Amsterdam of the Second Expedition to the East Indies, 19 July 1599
1599
Inscriptions
- signature and date, lower left:H Vroom F P Harlem 1599
- inscription, on one of the ships:mavryse(Mauritius)
- inscription, on the frame, in gold:Den eersten Mey anno 1598 / Mauritius, Hollant, Overijssel en Vrieslant / Vier schepen syn geseylt om specery te halen / naar Bantam, hebben oock den handel daer geplant en quamen rijcklijc weer voor d'Amsterdamsche palen / Den negentienden Iuly anno 1599.(On the first of May in the year 1598, the Mauritius, Hollant, Overijssel and Vrieslant, sailed to Bantam to collect spices, established trade there, and returned richly laden to the Amsterdam pilings on the nineteenth of July in the year 1599.)
Technical notes
The support, a plain-weave canvas, has been lined. The tacking edges have not been preserved, but cusping is visible on the left, top and bottom. The canvas may have been trimmed slightly on the right. A white ground was followed by thin paint layers for the sky, sea and foreground, while the figures and ships were executed in more opaque paint. Impasto was used for the mainly white highlights. A dark glaze was used for the shadows on the water. The small ships were painted over the water, while the three large ships were partly reserved.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 12 december 2004
Condition
Fair. There are some discoloured retouchings.
Conservation
- M. Dooijes, 1990: complete restoration
Original framing
An oak box frame, painted black with gilded sight edge and transitional section1Van Thiel and Kloek in Amsterdam 1984b, p. 74; Van Thiel and Kloek in Van Thiel/De Bruyn Kops 1995, p. 120.
Provenance
...; collection Kneppelhout, Oosterbeek;2Note RMA. from Johanna Maria Kneppelhout van Sterkenburg (1851-1923), The Hague, fl. 5,000, to the museum, 1921; on loan to the Amsterdams Historisch Museum since 1975
ObjectNumber: SK-A-2858
The artist
Biography
Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom (Haarlem c. 1566 - Haarlem 1640)
According to Karel van Mander in his lengthy account of Hendrick Vroom’s life, the artist was born in Haarlem in 1566. He began his career as a decorator of delftware, his father’s craft. A document of 1634 reveals that he learned ‘art’ in Delft. He travelled to Spain and Italy in his youth, remaining away from home for more than five years. While he was in Rome he met Paulus Bril, who encouraged him to start painting and gave him lessons. Between around 1585 and 1587 he was in the service of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici. His journey back to the Dutch Republic took him through Venice, Milan, Turin, Lyon, Paris and Rouen.
Back in Haarlem he married Joosgen Cornelisdr Gans, but he was soon travelling again. Around 1591 he went to Gdansk, where his uncle Frederick Henricksz was city architect. According to Van Mander he made an altarpiece there (now probably lost), and his uncle taught him the rules of perspective. He then set off for Spain again but was shipwrecked and returned to his native Haarlem in 1592, where he remained for the rest of his life.
From the moment he got back, Vroom started making tapestry designs and painting marines. A series of ten tapestry designs traced the battle between the English and the Spanish Armada.3The tapestries themselves were destroyed in a fire in the House of Lords in London in 1834. Another major series of tapestries he designed is preserved in Middelburg Abbey. Vroom made his earliest known dated painting in 1599, The Return to Amsterdam of the Second Expedition to the East Indies, 19 July 1599 (shown here). His earlier paintings are lost.
Van Mander describes and explains the origins of the new genre of marine painting as follows. ‘Returned home he [Vroom] continued, on the advice of the painters there, making pieces with ships, and gradually he got better and better at making them. And since there is much sea-faring in Holland, the public also started to take great pleasure in these little ships.’
Vroom painted historical naval battles, ships’ portraits and views of maritime towns like Hoorn, Amsterdam and Vlissingen. His highly detailed depictions soon brought him fame, enabling him to ask very high prices for them. Van Mander also says that he was highly productive, with the result that he earned a fortune from his work.
Vroom’s two sons, Cornelis (c. 1590/91-1661) and Frederik (c. 1600-67), both became painters. According to Houbraken, Jan Porcellis (before c. 1584-1632) was apprenticed to Hendrick Vroom. Given the similarities between Vroom’s work and that of Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen (before 1577-1633), it is assumed that he too was a pupil of Vroom’s.
Everhard Korthals Altes, 2007
References
Van Mander 1604, fols. 287r-88v; Ampzing 1621, [p. 33]; Schrevelius 1648, pp. 386-89; Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), pp. 146-47; Houbraken I, 1718, p. 213; Von Wurzbach II, 1910, pp. 833-34; Bredius II, 1916, pp. 659-61, 667-79, VII, 1921, p. 274; Thieme/Becker XXXIV, 1940, pp. 581-82; Russell 1983, pp. 91-140, 204-11; Ruurs in Miedema II, 1995, pp. 226-38; Giltaij in Rotterdam-Berlin 1996, p. 79; Van Thiel-Stroman 2006, pp. 332-37
Entry
Four ships are being welcomed home on the IJ by a mass of small boats and yachts carrying jubilant passengers. The Amsterdam skyline is in the right background, with the spire of the Oude Kerk clearly recognizable.
When the painting was being restored in 1990 it turned out to bear the date 1599, which makes it Vroom’s earliest known dated work. It is more detailed and colourful than most of his later paintings, which sometimes look a little hackneyed and flat. The smoke from the cannons is schematic and a touch naive. It must be said, though, that it is extremely difficult to discover a clear line of stylistic development in Vroom’s work.
It is possible that the painting was commissioned by one of the merchants of the Compagnie van Verre (Company of Distant Lands), the forerunner of the Dutch East India Company founded in 1602,4Cf. Kloek in Amsterdam 1993, pp. 529-30. for the scene shows the return of the second expedition to the East Indies, which arrived back in Amsterdam on 19 July 1599 after a 15-month voyage. The expedition to Bantam under the command of Jacob van Neck was the first successful one to the Orient. The original but completely overpainted inscription in gold lettering on the box frame, part of which is original, gives the dates of departure and homecoming, as well as naming the ships as the Mauritius, Hollant, Overijssel and Vrieslant.5Kloek in Amsterdam 1993, p. 528; Miedema 2000, pp. 267-68. It is noteworthy that Vroom immortalized this important event almost immediately after the fleet’s return. Most depictions of maritime occasions were made long afterwards.6Daalder in Rotterdam-Berlin 1996, pp. 37-38.
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. 333.
Literature
Bol 1973, p. 26; Keyes 1975, I, pp. 19, 20, 28; Russell 1983, pp. 149, 152; Minneapolis etc. 1990, pp. 195-97, no. 50; Kloek in Amsterdam 1993, pp. 528-29, no. 205; Miedema 2000, pp. 261-62
Collection catalogues
1934, p. 311, no. 2606b; 1960, p. 336, no. 2606 A 3; 1976, p. 592, no. A 2858; 1992, p. 91, no. A 2858; 2007, no. 333
Citation
E. Korthals Altes, 2007, 'Hendrik Cornelisz. Vroom, The Return to Amsterdam of the Second Expedition to the East Indies, 19 July 1599, 1599', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.9420
(accessed 26 April 2025 18:11:35).Footnotes
- 1Van Thiel and Kloek in Amsterdam 1984b, p. 74; Van Thiel and Kloek in Van Thiel/De Bruyn Kops 1995, p. 120.
- 2Note RMA.
- 3The tapestries themselves were destroyed in a fire in the House of Lords in London in 1834.
- 4Cf. Kloek in Amsterdam 1993, pp. 529-30.
- 5Kloek in Amsterdam 1993, p. 528; Miedema 2000, pp. 267-68.
- 6Daalder in Rotterdam-Berlin 1996, pp. 37-38.