Willem van de Velde, 'Three Ships in a Gale', 1673

The merchant ships we see here are in some peril. The wind is so strong that they have been forced to take down their sails and are drifting at the mercy of the gale and the surging sea. They have little control over direction and all three must be towing sea anchors, a sort of underwater parachute, to slow themselves down and reduce the risk of being blown onto rocks or into shallow water.

Our attention is focused on the nearest ship, a man-of-war, as it ploughs into a breaking wave. A sudden shaft of sunlight seems to highlight the moment – a flash of brilliant white foam against the deep grey of a looming storm cloud. But this vessel is faring well compared with the ship in the middle ground, which appears to have lost two of its masts. Its bowsprit has snapped in half, while the crew is battling to secure one of the yard arms lying across the foredeck. The mainsails of a third ship, which is just discernible in the near distance, have been let fly, the crew apparently unable to bring them in safely in such extreme conditions. There is nothing to be done with them now: they will soon be shredded by the force of the wind.

Willem van de Velde was careful to depict these details accurately. Holland was a powerful trading nation which depended on its merchant fleet and powerful navy for its prosperity and security, and on the inland seas, estuaries, rivers and canals for its domestic transport network. So most of his clientele would have been familiar the maritime world. Here, the configuration of the hull and masts, and even the finer points of the rigging – some of which is flailing wildly in the wind – are correctly rendered. It is often possible, through the flags and the design of the hull, to identify the nationality or point of origin of the vessels in van der Velde’s pictures. Here the red pennants with a white device in the centre at the mastheads of the nearest ship are probably the flag of Flushing. The vessel just behind flies a tattered Dutch flag at the top of the foremast, suggesting that it carries the vice-admiral (second in command) of a merchant fleet.

When van de Velde painted this picture he had just moved from Amsterdam to England, another maritime nation with a powerful navy and merchant fleet. He appears to have had no problem selling pictures of Dutch ships on the London market, even though there were three major sea battles between the Dutch and the allied navies of the British and French in 1673, the year in which this picture was made. Ironically, it seems likely that van de Velde was at sea on the English side during the first two of these battles. His father, a painter of the same name who was also well known for his maritime scenes, certainly was. He made several drawings during these voyages, and his son seems to have used two of them (both in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) to help with this composition.