Willem van de Velde the Younger

Probably in the collection of Charles Ferdinand d’Artois, Duc de Berri (1778-1820), Paris;
With Alexis Delahante, London (1767-1837);
With Robert Hume (1808-40), 65 Berners Street, London, by 1848;
From whom purchased on 21^st April 1848 for £250 by Alexander Hamilton, 10^th Duke of Hamilton, 7^th Duke of Brandon (1767-1852), Hamilton Palace, South Lanarkshire;
At Hamilton Palace In the Cabinet from 1848 to circa 1852 and thereafter in the Breakfast Room of the Old State Rooms on the first floor of the West Wing;
Thence by descent until sold (`The Hamilton Palace sale'), London, Christie’s, 17 June 1882, lot 35 to Christopher Beckett Denison for £136.5s.;
Christopher Beckett Denison M.P. (1825-1884), 41 Upper Grosvenor Street, London;
His deceased sale, London, Christie’s, 13 June 1885, lot 923 to Watson for £829.10s. on behalf of an ancestor of the present owners;
Thence by direct descent.

1852/3 Hamilton Palace manuscript inventory of 1852/3, Hamilton Archive, vol. 1228, p. 140, as `Sea View and Shipping [by] Vanderveldi,' as in the Breakfast Room of the Old State Rooms;
G. Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain, London 1854, vol. III, p. 303.

The following condition report is provided by Simon Folkes, who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's. The painting is on an oak panel consisting of two separate planks with the join running across the sky just above the top mast of the central boat. Narrow oak strips have also been added around the outside edge of the panel, presumably to enable the image to be seen in total when in the frame. The panel itself is completely stable and has not warped in any way. The condition of the paint layers is generally very good. There are a scattering of small old retouchings in the clouds along with a short vertical damage in the sky at the top right corner which has been broadly over-painted in an attempt to blend in the restoration with the original paint. There is some minor retouching in the rowing boat at the bottom right and some of the rigging in the two ships in the middle distance has also been strengthened. The painting is covered in a very discoloured yellow varnish which is very patchy and uneven.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

In a dead calm in the middle of a summer’s day, a Wijdschip is anchored close inshore with its sails partly unfurled.  Immediately beyond it is a smaller sprit-rigged vessel, probably a Kaag, with its mainsail raised, with a small vessel with its mast and furled sail lowered alongside.  They may be resting, or transferring cargoes, and the sails are probably partly raised to dry them.  Beyond them is another small vessel, probably a fishing pink, to judge from its bezan rig.  A little further away to the right a Smalschip is moored, with its mainsail partly raised, its sprit in the slings, and figures boarding from a rowing boat, and offshore to the left are larger vessels, including a Man O’ War firing a salute.  In the foreground to the right a Weyschuit,is beached on a spit of sand, while to the left fisherman aboard a rowing skiff are pulling in a net. 

This is a scene of immense tranquillity. There is human activity, but it is measured rather than frenetic, and Van de Velde has two of his nearest figures, a fisherman in his characteristic hat and a man carrying a creel on his back, engaged in conversation.  Other figures are gesturing and evidently speaking to each other, and given the dead calm conditions, their voices would be clearly heard by the viewer, were he present.  Without vainglory, Van de Velde is showing us what a master of observation he was.  That all of the vessels other than those in the far distance are clearly identifiable, and of different types, is certainly deliberate, and the placing of the two most prominent vessels moored alongside each other, which allows for the sails of the nearest one to cast a shadow on the other, and for their reflections, with light and shadow differentiated, poses a complex problem for the painter which he resolves with a seeming effortlessness.  The observation is highly acute and the depiction of details apparently intuitive: for example the man scrubbing the hull of the beached Weyschuit has his breeches rolled up over bare legs, but their lower parts are clearly wet.  The anchor warp of the Wijdschip has draped over it the small line used for freeing the fluke when the anchor is to be raised, a detail found in a few other calms by Van de Velde from this period, including the one dated 1660 in the National Gallery in London.¹

 Van de Velde started to paint inshore calms, most with some shoreline visible, in about 1653, and he continued to produce them until the early 1660s.²  It is generally held that in a small group of pictures painted circa 1659-1662, of which this undated work is likely to be one, they reach an apogee of refinement.³  Most are set under a sky of piled up cumulonimbus, and in all of them the transition from foreground to distance is seamlessly handled.  The steelier tones of the water in the present work may mean that it dates from the beginning of this triumphal phase, circa 1659-60, since in the slightly later paintings Van de Velde tends to accentuate the vertical to a slightly greater degree and to depict more blue sky reflected in the water.  Furthermore, the theme of two small vessels anchored side-by-side with drying sails is found in a small number of works of horizontal format (and almost square; on both panel and canvas) from circa 1659-60.⁴  A cleaning of this picture might clarify this matter, but in any event the likely variation of date is at most four years.

 PROVENANCE

Alexis Delahante was an energetic French dealer of modest noble bearing who spent the Napoleonic War years in the Netherlands and then England before returning to France in 1814/15 to buy stock. He was active again in London from 1816 to 1827 and intermittently thereafter until his death in 1837. He sold both privately and through Phillip’s, holding six sales between 1810 and 1830, in which four Van de Veldes, all simply described as ‘A Sea piece’ were offered. Unfortunately details of the support and measurements are not given and the outcome of the bidding is unknown.

The present picture was acquired by Alexander, 10^th Duke of Hamilton, from his long-standing furniture-supplier, decorator and agent Robert Hume in 1848. Like many of Hamilton’s advisers, Hume had been inherited from the Duke’s father-in-law, William Beckford (1760-1844), having worked for him as a gilder and furniture designer at both Fonthill and Lansdown Tower.⁵  A letter from Hume to the Duke dated 18 April 1848 records that Hume was willing to accept ‘the two Pictures of Animated Nature’ belonging to the Duke and £250 for the Calm’. The work was sent up to Hamilton Palace by train three days later and Hume acknowledged receipt of ‘the balance for the Calm £250 W. V. Velde’ on 25 April.⁶  This transaction was directly preceded by an exchange of letters dating from 4 January to the 18 April in which Hume offered the Duke three Dutch paintings from the collection of the Duc de Berri, of which it is likely that this is one.⁷  Under the Duke’s ownership the painting was displayed in the ‘Cabinet’ (a name for the 1^st or 2^nd dressing room on the first floor of the West wing) from 1848 to circa 1852 before being moved to the ‘Breakfast Room’ of the Old State Rooms on the first floor of the West wing of Hamilton Palace.

The Palace itself was home to a rich and varied art collection, being described in 1844 by the artist Sir David Wilkie as “…the first gallery of art our country can boast of.”⁸  The contents made an unprecedented £397, 562 when put up for sale in 1882 and feverish speculation led The Times to report that Christopher Beckett Denison, the subsequent owner of this picture, had bought a quarter of the collection for  £250,000.⁹  Christopher Beckett Denison was the second son of Edmund Beckett Denison, 1^st Lord Grimthorpe (1816-1905), Chairman of the Great Northern Railway Company.  An avid collector; he acquired works from the Hamilton, Novar, Leigh Court and Stourhead collections which included Rubens’s Daniel and the Lions Den (Washington, National Gallery of Art), and Botticelli’s The Madonna and Child with a Pomegranate (sold London, Christies, 7 December 2006, lot 39) before his untimely death in 1884 at the age of 59.

The first and only mention of this picture in the literature is by Gustav Waagen, who saw it in the collection of The Duke of Hamilton at Hamilton Palace in 1851, when it was hanging in the 'Cabinet'.¹⁰  It clearly made a strong impression on him: “William van de Velde. – A quiet sea; both water and sky of the utmost transparency and delicacy.  One of the most beautiful pictures I know of this master.”   

We are grateful to Dr. Godfrey Evans, Principal Curator of European Decorative Arts and Applied Art and Design for the National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh, for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.

1.  See M.S. Robinson, Van de Velde.  A Catalogue of the Paintings of the Elder and the Younger Willem van de Velde, London 1990, vol. I, pp. 388-9, no. 217, reproduced.
2.  There are many fewer after this date, perhaps because of the demands placed on the Van de Veldes by commissions for battle pictures and other formal marine subjects.
3.  See for example G.S. Keyes, Mirror of Empire, exhibition catalogue, Minneapolis 1990, p. 162, under no. 34: “…a small group of pictures from the early 1660s to which Van de Velde brings his concept of the calm to perfection”
4.  See for example the paintings in The Hague, Rijksdienst Beeldende Kunst (dated 1659), Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussische Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Munich, Alte Pinakothek & London, National Gallery; see Robinson, 1990, vol. I, pp. 386-7, 389-391, 484-6, nos. 610, 521, 522, 201, all reproduced.
5.  A. A.Tait, “The Duke of Hamilton’s Palace”, in The Burlington Magazine, vol. CXXV, July 1983, p. 395.
6.  Hamilton Archive, Lennoxlove, bundle 1000.
7.  Hamilton Archive, Lennoxlove, bundle 1000.
8.  M. Glendinning, R. MacInnes & A. MacKechnie, A History of Scottish Architecture:From the Renaissance to the Present Day, Edinburgh 1996, p. 222.
9.  G. Wilson, C. Bremer-David et al., French Furniture and Gilt Bronzes: Baroque and Regence: Catalogue of the J. Paul Getty Museum Collection, Los Angeles 2008, p. 18.
10.  See Literature. Letter XXVIII.