Willem van de Velde the Elder

Dr. Walter Beck (1895-1968), Berlin (L.2603b);

Sale, Zürich, Schuler Auktionen, 10 December 2010, lot 4620 (as Margareta de Heer);

Sale, Amsterdam, Art Europe Auctions, 23 May 2016, lot 71

This study of a small Dutch warship, finely executed in pen and ink on vellum, can be compared with a small group of technically and stylistically similar drawings of marine subjects, in various museum collections. As Remmelt Daalder has kindly informed us, three of these other drawings, apparently by the same hand as this, are in the collection of the Amsterdam Scheepvaartmuseum, and another is in the Fries Scheepvaartmuseum, Sneek.¹

Because those four drawings all bear the initials MH, which has been taken as an artist's monogrammed signature, they have traditionally been attributed to the Frisian artist Margareta de Heer (1600-1658), although she is otherwise only known for extremely refined gouaches on vellum, representing farmyard scenes or still-life compositions, around forty of which survive. Daalder points out, however, another drawing, in the Rijksmuseum, again apparently by the same hand, but this time signed not MH but W V Velde.² Comparison with that drawing suggests that the present work and the others like it with their MH 'signatures', should actually be given to Van de Velde, rather than the gouache specialist, Margareta de Heer.

Daalder considers the Rijksmuseum drawing an extremely early work by Van de Velde, executed around 1630/35, when he was just establishing himself as an artist, and was specialising in finely executed drawings on vellum, and designs for marine prints.³ Indeed, the present drawing is strongly reminiscent of the print of Admiral Tromp's flagship, the Aemilia, engraved anonymously after a design by Van de Velde and published by Cornelis Danckerts around 1640.⁴

We are grateful to Remmelt Daalder for his help in the cataloguing of this drawing, and for kindly informing us that he tentatively endorses its attribution to Willem van de Velde the Elder.

^1. Email of 8 June 2025

^2. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. RP-T-1905-195

^3.R. Daalder, Van de Velde & Son, Marine Painters, Leiden 2016, pp. 44-45

^4.Daalder, op. cit., p. 38, reproduced