A Warship Built for France and a Dutch Yacht under Sail

Support The support consists of two horizontally grained oak planks (26.7 and 27.9 cm), approx. 1 cm thick. The reverse is bevelled on the left and right and has regularly spaced saw marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1624. The panel could have been ready for use by 1635, but a date in or after 1641 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, beige ground extends up to the edges of the support. It consists of yellow and brown earth pigments and some white pigment.
Underdrawing A dark brown underdrawing consisting of lines in a liquid medium is visible to the naked eye, below the figurehead of the large warship, for example. Lines in a dry medium can also be discerned in the rigging at points where the underdrawing was not followed. A thick, diagonal line above the foremast of the large warship was detected with infrared reflectography and appears to be accidental.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. The composition was built up from the back to the front in what appear to be one or two thin layers, and mostly wet in wet. The ships were executed on top of a first lay-in of the water, with the waves being added later, continuing over the vessels. Sails, rigging, the cityscape on the left horizon and the small boats on the right were all applied on top of the already dried paint. The brushwork is quite delicate and precise, as shown in the careful depiction of the small blocks in the rigging, the decoration of the boats and the small figures. Slight impasto was used to create the yellow and white highlights on the different parts of the ships and the waves, adding to the three-dimensionality of these elements.
Erika Smeenk-Metz, 2022

Good. There is woodworm damage in the bottom left corner as seen from the reverse. At some point the join was reinforced with wooden blocks (no longer present). During a later treatment the back was covered with a dark paint layer. There are a number of paint losses along the edges, some of them covered with slightly discoloured retouchings. Tiny remnants of a darker, older varnish are present in the lower parts of the paint layer. The varnish has yellowed slightly.

…; anonymous sale, Amsterdam (C.F. Roos), 27 September 1881 sqq., no. 305, as Anonymous (‘Twee oorlogschepen op zee bij vollen wind’), fl. 11, to the Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst, The Hague (inv. no. 5679);¹¹Note RMA. on loan to the Nederlandsch Scheepvaart Museum, Amsterdam, October 1921-before 1949;²²Note RMA. on loan to the Stedelijk Museum Het Prinsenhof, Delft, 1949-65; transferred to the museum, as A Man-of-War Built in 1626 at a Dutch Shipyard for Louis XIII Steering for a Dutch Port under Escort of a Dutch Ship, 1974

ObjectNumber: SK-A-4261

This painting was attributed to Jacob Gerritsz Loef by the twentieth-century British marine specialist Eric Palmer.⁷⁷B.J.A. Renckens, ‘Monogrammist IGL = Jacob Gerritsz. Loef’, Oud Holland 73 (1958), pp. 169-77, esp. p. 175. The diagonal swell of the waves and the ships riding high in the water are the artist’s trademarks. Sailing on the left is a large man-of-war flying French flags. According to early collection catalogues of the museum it was built for France in a Dutch yard. The one of 1934 says specifically that it was the vessel that the English snatched from Texel harbour on 8 October 1627 and refused to give back.

The French commission was related to Louis XIII signing the Treaty of Compiègne with the Republic on 12 June 1624, in an alliance against Spain that would allow him to make large loans to the Dutch so that the latter could continue their war with the Spanish after the end of the Twelve Years’ Truce (1621). It also obliged the Republic to come to the king’s aid if France found itself in danger. As early as December a request for 20 warships reached The Hague. In that same year Cardinal Richelieu, who had been made Louis’s first minister, started building up a permanent French war fleet, and further orders were placed with the States-General in January and February 1625. The British regarded this support to and collaboration with France as a threat, for it would make that country a formidable rival at sea. They showed their displeasure by seizing the French Saint Esprit on 8 October 1627,⁸⁸L.V.A. (Lieuwe van Aitzema), Saken van staet en oorlogh, in, ende omtrent de Vereenigde Nederlanden, beginnende met het jaer 1621, ende eyndigende met het jaer 1632, The Hague 1669, p. 649. which was also called ‘Toiras’ as it belonged to Jean de Saint Bonnet, Marquis de Toiras.⁹⁹J. Vichot, Répertoire d‘identité des navires de guerre français des origines à nos jours, Paris 1967 (unpag.), T-3; P. Le Conte, Répertoire des navires de guerre français, Cherbourg 1932, p. 140.

There is no extant image of the Saint Esprit, so there is no proof that it is the large three-master in this painting, which appears to be based on an etching of another French ship published by Hendrick Hondius (fig. a). The print is inscribed ‘Navire Royale faicte en Hollande Anno 1626’ and was also known as Le Navire du Roi, L’Admiral, Saint-Louis, Grand Saint-Louis, Vaisseau du Roi and Le Royal.¹⁰¹⁰J. Vichot, Répertoire d‘identité des navires de guerre français des origines à nos jours, Paris 1967 (unpag.), N-1. It is therefore assumed that Loef depicted the same vessel as Hondius, which accounts for the work’s traditional title of A Man-of-War Built in 1626 at a Dutch Shipyard for Louis XIII.¹¹¹¹Ekkart in R.E.O. Ekkart and G. Reichwein, Portret van Enkhuizen in de Gouden Eeuw, exh. cat. Enkhuizen (Zuiderzeemuseum) 1990-91, p. 45. However, he altered some of the distinctive details, such as the figurehead. In Hondius’s etching it takes the form of Jupiter astride an eagle and brandishing a bundle of thunderbolts, but Loef turned that into Neptune with his trident in a two-wheeled chariot drawn by sea monsters. He probably did not set out to portray the same ship, so either it is a different or a generic one. As various technical errors have been identified in Hondius’s vessel,¹²¹²Written communication, Jeroen ter Brugge, RMA, 3 July 2019. it is not very likely that a marine specialist like Loef, who set great store by an accurate rendering in his paintings, would imitate such a print so directly and comprehensively. He may, though, have used it as a point of departure.

In any event, there is nothing strange about Loef depicting this three-master destined for France. The men-of-war were built in yards in Amsterdam and Enkhuizen.¹³¹³I.M. de Groot, Sailing Ships in Dutch Prints: Four Centuries of Naval Art from the Rijksmuseum, Washington 1982, p. 12. The only landmark in the otherwise vague skyline of the port city in the background is a slender tower, which could be the spire of the Zuiderkerk in Loef’s putative native town of Enkhuizen.

De Beer has placed the picture around 1635 at the latest on stylistic grounds.¹⁴¹⁴De Beer in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, LXXXV, Munich/Leipzig 2015, p. 148. Indeed, the dendrochronology makes it clear that the panel could have been ready for use by that time.¹⁵¹⁵See Technical notes. The subject, though, has to be understood in the light of the French commissions from Dutch yards in the 1620s. Willem van de Velde II also immortalized men-of-war built for France in a few paintings between 1667 and 1671, although they cannot be identified as yet.¹⁶¹⁶Present whereabouts unknown; illustrated and described in J.N.H. Keeman, ‘Frans linieschip tweemaal verkocht’, Scheepshistorie 4 (2012), no. 14, pp. 102-05. And Lille, Paials des Beaux-Arts; illustrated in M.S. Robinson, Van de Velde: A Catalogue of the Paintings of the Elder and the Younger Willem van de Velde, I, Greenwich 1990, p. 288. Given its large size and exceptional theme, this Warship Built for France and a Dutch Yacht under Sail was presumably made for a client who could probably be found among the personnel of the admiralties, naval architects and quartermasters involved with the order.

Eddy Schavemaker, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

B.J.A. Renckens, ‘Monogrammist IGL = Jacob Gerritsz. Loef’, Oud Holland 73 (1958), pp. 169-77, esp. pp. 170, 172, 175; De Beer in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, LXXXV, Munich/Leipzig 2015, p. 148

1903, p. 12, no. 114 (as A Man-of-War Built in 1626 at a Dutch Shipyard for Louis XIII); 1934, p. 11, no. 114 (as Anonymous Dutch School, A Man-of-War Built in 1626 at a Dutch Shipyard for Louis XIII); 1976, p. 351, no. A 4261 (as A Man-of-War Built in 1626 at a Dutch Shipyard for Louis XIII Steering for a Dutch Port under Escort of a Dutch Ship)

Eddy Schavemaker, 2022, 'Jacob Gerritz. Loef, A Warship Built for France and a Dutch Yacht under Sail, c. 1635', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.10174