Exhibit of the week: The Golden Age of Dutch Seascapes

Peabody Essex Museum

Salem, Mass.

Through Sept. 7

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The painters of Holland’s “golden age” have long been admired for their still lifes and intimate domestic scenes, said Bill Van Siclen in the Providence Journal-Bulletin. But these types of works were hardly the most popular at the time. Seascapes were more or less invented by Dutch artists of the 17th century, as a means of celebrating the nation’s naval pre-eminence. A new exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum collects many bombastic canvases bristling with elaborate portrayals of battles, storms, sunsets, and rainbows. Yet even among these enormous set pieces, the best still find room for the graceful touches typically associated with Dutch painters. Sunlight on a Stormy Sea, by Bonaventura Peeters the Elder, shows the painter to be a Rembrandtesque master of the “dramatic contrasts between light and dark.” Ludolf Backhuysen’s luminous views of moored merchant ships, meanwhile, reveal “a Vermeer-like talent for rendering the effects of natural light.”

At first, Dutch seascapes were mostly about the ships themselves and the wealth they represented, said Alan Burke in the Salem, Mass., News. But ­gradually painters came to realize that they had a more compelling subject: nature itself. Artists’ “skill at capturing the ocean’s many moods grew more and more sophisticated, if not spectacular, as years passed.” Where once the seas were painted as calm blue backgrounds, later paintings make them seem nearly alive, “the waves roiling, roaring, ­spraying.” Naturalism also came to rule in the portrayal of figures populating the ships. In one Peeters painting, “close examination reveals a crewman onshore lifting a hogshead of drink to his lips.” In another work, you can actually­ see “the tiny face of a seasick sailor vomiting off a storm-tossed stern.”

Early Dutch seascapes were rendered from a “bird’s-eye—or God’s-eye—view,” said Sebastian Smee in The Boston Globe. Later paintings seek to place the viewer right in the action. Even in battle scenes filled with hundreds of people, individual faces and characters possess a vividness that’s “frequently astonishing.” Though the most “ferocious protagonist” is undoubtedly the sea itself, keep an eye on how often rolling waves are mirrored by a roiling sky above. “You can drift ecstatically through the clouds of a Jan van de Cappelle or a Willem van de Velde the Younger for hours on end before even noticing what’s going on below.”