Chapter IX

From Holland, the first naval power in Europe of the seventeenth century, a love of the sea and an expression of it in art were naturally to be expected: and among the several fine painters who now for the first time made the sea their subject, two at least, Reynier Zeeman and Ludolph Backhuysen, have left some admirable etchings. Simon de Vlieger painted, but did not etch marine subjects; of Jan van de Capelle only three indifferent plates are known; and Willem van de Velde did not etch at all.

Zeeman’s real name was Nooms; but his love of the sea procured him early the name which he adopts on all his plates. He travelled much, but worked chiefly at Amsterdam, where probably he was born in 1623.

Zeeman’s etchings are nearly all in sets, representing views of Amsterdam, different kinds of Dutch shipping, and naval battles. They passed through the hands of several publishers, who, we may conjecture, commissioned him to do them: and they were evidently popular. Such work, nominally and primarily intended to serve a literary rather than a pictorial purpose, suffers in consequence. The artist has had to choose his subjects with a view to those whose interest was not in the etcher as etcher, but in his knowledge of ships and skill in depicting them.

Yet Zeeman has managed to serve art as well as history. Ships, with their ordered intricacy of rigging and their mysterious beauty, have an endless fascination for him: for it is shipping, rather than the sea itself, which he loves. And his ships are etched with an admirable feeling, a simple and effective handling of the bitten lines. His men of war move with royal stateliness; and the battle-pieces have something of the magnificence one imagines in the old sea-fights. Equally good in their way are plates like the fishing boats (Fig. 19) setting out at morning over the still sea, bathed in a wash of limpid air and sunshine. Only in his clouds does Zeeman completely fail. Historically, too, these prints are interesting. Here, with patriotic pride, Zeeman is fond of showing the English ship of the line or frigate, with her sails riddled, conquered at last, and with the Dutch tricolour hoisted over the St. George’s Cross. Nothing could more

vividly bring home to Englishmen the powerful position of Holland at the time.

Backhuysen’s etchings are later than Zeeman’s, being all produced in 1701, when the artist was seventy years old,[9] and seven years before his death at Amsterdam. A pupil of Everdingen, he had soon risen to fame and was employed or sought after by many foreign princes, including the Tsar Peter the Great; and from over much production his work suffered.

The etchings, however, though produced so late in life, are neither languid nor feeble. In freshness and vivacity they excel Backhuysen’s drawings. It is the same with Zeeman: probably because the etching-needle has so much more capacity for giving the crispness of foam and the sharp lights of running waves, than pencil and sepia. No one, till Turner came, succeeded at all in painting the mass and weight of water as the tides move it in deep seas; but the easily agitated, breezy motion of the shallow Dutch waters is often suggested with a pleasant freshness by Backhuysen. The best of the etchings is that of the ship under sail, crushing the water under her bows into foam.