The National Gallery of Art’s ongoing exhibition “Water, Wind, and Waves: Marine Paintings from the Dutch Golden Age” brings together masterworks of seventeenth-century seascape painting, a rarely exhibited genre intimately connected to the Dutch Republic’s rise to global maritime power. On view through November 25, the exhibition includes nearly fifty paintings, prints, drawings, and antique ship models, which all explore the Dutch relationship to the sea in the seventeenth century. With monumental canvases of roiling oceans and warships cracking against shoals, the exhibition’s curator, Alexandra Libby, presents a vision that contradicts the common view of the Northern Baroque. The hushed interiors of Vermeer find no quarter here.
A work of art tells much about its audience, and these paintings reflect the aspirations and anxieties of the Dutch Republic’s ascendant classes. Merchants, bankers, and shipbuilders, made newly wealthy by maritime commerce, broke the conventional molds of royal and religious artistic patronage and sought instead to advertise their status and success.
The seascape painters also found willing patrons in the seven admiralties of the Dutch Republic, who commissioned grand canvases to fill their boardrooms and meeting halls. Never far from its enemies and trading partners, the Republic spent the majority of the seventeenth century embroiled in conflicts with the Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese navies. Maritime rivalry was at the forefront of national concerns, and patrons sought artwork that put the Dutch Republic on equal footing with its rivals. Commissioned works featured harbors replete with thousands of ships and