Old Master Paintings

Adriaen van Salm (Dutch, c.1660-1720) Datable to&nbsp;circa&nbsp;1710. Around 1710, Adriaen van Salm, also known as Adriaen Cornelisz van der Salm or Adriaen van der Salm in contemporary pieces, painted this panel with a Dutch warship, a&nbsp;konvooier, in the middle of and protecting the herring fleet. The work consists of shaded lines and brushed black and gray tones, a so-called&nbsp;penschilderij&nbsp;or pen painting, an art form that enjoyed great popularity in the second half of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. Van Salm lived and worked most of his life in Delfshaven (now a borough of Rotterdam), where both herring and whaling were flourishing in his time. As far as is known, he made nearly a hundred pen paintings, both for the free market and on commission, serving the local market and the cities of Delft and Rotterdam. He is believed to have no formal training as a painter. However, due to his skill in drawing ships, he grew into one of the great little masters of pen painting and his work is represented in almost all collections of the major maritime museums in the world. A pen painting is technically not a painting, but a drawing in ink on a canvas or panel primed with white oil paint. In contemporary inventory inventories, this type of work has also been described as "a stuck drawn with a pen" or a "belyste teyckening." The pen painting proved particularly attractive as an art form to maritime painters, because it gave them the opportunity to accurately depict the rigging and all ship details. The shadows were usually shaded with heavy lines and the more distant objects with lighter shades of ink to create depth. This drawing-like method gave the pen painting the effect of an etching or engraving, but in a format that could never be achieved with paper. For example, some pen paintings by Willem van de Velde the Elder (1611-1693), who worked in Amsterdam since the early 1640s, are no less than 1.70 by 2.20 meters in size. Willem van de Velde the Elder is known as the founder of pen painting as a new art form in naval painting. In the years before him, his colleagues occasionally also drew with pen and ink on a white primed panel or canvas, but Van de Velde the Elder brought this method to the attention of a large audience and his method was widely followed by professional painters as 'lovers of the arts,' or the amateur artists.&nbsp; We are grateful to Dr. Remmelt Daalder for his assistance in cataloguing this work.

ADRIAEN VAN SALM