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Lot Essay
This small-scale, meticulously executed work is datable to the first years of Willem van de Velde the Younger's activity in England, more precisely to circa 1675 or shortly thereafter. Willem arrived in England with his father, Willem van de Velde the Elder, in 1672 and settled in Greenwich, working primarily for Charles II, who provided them with lodgings and allowed them to use the Queen's House as their studio.
Under a sky filled with heavy, dark clouds an English Royal yacht sails before a stiff breeze. Bathed in a shaft of sunlight from the left, she is seen from just above the port beam. She flies the Union Jack at her bowsprit, a pennant at the masthead and a red ensign on her stern. A boat is being towed on a line astern, carrying several passengers. In the right foreground a barge flying a red ensign is being rowed forward. In the right distance an English Man-of-War is seen head to the wind with her mizzen set, her fore and main topsails half hoisted and laid aback, and her fore course clewed up. Her main mast flies the royal standard, the Admiralty is at her foremast and the Union flag at her mizzen. More vessels can be seen in the far distance, scattered across the view near the horizon.
Robinson (op. cit) .) imagined that this small marine must represent a specific event and proposed two different readings, depending on whether the Man-of-War was a two-decker or a three-decker (a detail he was not able to establish on the basis of photographs). The ship in question is in fact a two-decker and the flag on the main mast indicates the presence of the sovereign on board. Robinson's suggestion for this scenario was that the ship could be the Harwich with Charles II aboard journeying to or from Portsmouth in stormy weather in June or July 1675, on the occasion of the launch of the Royal James Robinson's alternative and here rejected reading was that the ship could be the three-decker Royal Sovereign and the subject King Charles II visiting her in 1673 after the Battle of Schooneveld.
Robinson also tentatively identified the yacht in the foreground as the second Katherine on the basis of this vessel's appearance in two drawings preserved in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich (M.S. Robinson, Van de Velde Drawings: A Catalogue of Drawings in the National Maritime Museum made by the Elder and the Younger Willem van de Velde, Cambridge, 1958-74, I, pp. 95, 380, nos. 546 and 547, and pp. 96, 381, no. 552). Further evidence to support this identification is found in a painting by Van de Velde, which shows the yacht off Gravesend in 1689 (op. cit., pp. 1000-3, no. 101).
Under a sky filled with heavy, dark clouds an English Royal yacht sails before a stiff breeze. Bathed in a shaft of sunlight from the left, she is seen from just above the port beam. She flies the Union Jack at her bowsprit, a pennant at the masthead and a red ensign on her stern. A boat is being towed on a line astern, carrying several passengers. In the right foreground a barge flying a red ensign is being rowed forward. In the right distance an English Man-of-War is seen head to the wind with her mizzen set, her fore and main topsails half hoisted and laid aback, and her fore course clewed up. Her main mast flies the royal standard, the Admiralty is at her foremast and the Union flag at her mizzen. More vessels can be seen in the far distance, scattered across the view near the horizon.
Robinson (op. cit) .) imagined that this small marine must represent a specific event and proposed two different readings, depending on whether the Man-of-War was a two-decker or a three-decker (a detail he was not able to establish on the basis of photographs). The ship in question is in fact a two-decker and the flag on the main mast indicates the presence of the sovereign on board. Robinson's suggestion for this scenario was that the ship could be the Harwich with Charles II aboard journeying to or from Portsmouth in stormy weather in June or July 1675, on the occasion of the launch of the Royal James Robinson's alternative and here rejected reading was that the ship could be the three-decker Royal Sovereign and the subject King Charles II visiting her in 1673 after the Battle of Schooneveld.
Robinson also tentatively identified the yacht in the foreground as the second Katherine on the basis of this vessel's appearance in two drawings preserved in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich (M.S. Robinson, Van de Velde Drawings: A Catalogue of Drawings in the National Maritime Museum made by the Elder and the Younger Willem van de Velde, Cambridge, 1958-74, I, pp. 95, 380, nos. 546 and 547, and pp. 96, 381, no. 552). Further evidence to support this identification is found in a painting by Van de Velde, which shows the yacht off Gravesend in 1689 (op. cit., pp. 1000-3, no. 101).