Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
This picture is by Willem van de Velde the Younger
and it shows a British man-of-war in a storm.
It dates from about 1680
and it is one of the first detailed images we have
of a British warship of the late 17th century.
It was one of the new battleships that was build by the Royal Navy
in the Greenwich Deptford shipyards in 1677
where a fleet of fighting ships was built
essentially to protect the interests, the commercial interests
of Britain and its growing empire
and particularly to dominate the trade routes of the North Sea
and the passage to the West Indies
which was highly disputed with other European nations at the time.
So the creation of a fleet was seen as an important step
towards securing British interests
not only in Northern Europe but around the world.
The ship we see here is an example of marine technology at its highest
These ships were light, maneuverable
but also heavily armed with 70 cannon.
The picture here shows a ship with the sails down
the sales have been trimmed in order for the ship
to cope with this storm that its riding out
and you can see the tempestuous seas raging all round it.
The helmsman is bringing the ship's bow round to face into the wind
and the foresail has been allowed to flap free
so that there is no forward momentum
but the sail at the rear of the ship is kept vertical
in order to give steerability, additional steerability to this craft.
Van de Velde was invited to this country by Charles II
in order to depict these new ships.
There was no other artist in England of equal stature
the Dutch painters were the masters, if you like, of marine painting.
So Charles invited one of the most prominent Dutch artists
Van de Velde to come and settle in England
gave him a studio in the Queen's house at Greenwich
and invited him then to start portraying these warships.
The detailed drawings of many of these paintings still exist
and are kept at Greenwich at the National Maritime Museum
and they demonstrate Van de Velde's supreme knowledge
of marine architecture.
He understood every nut and bolt of these ships
and he went to the shipyards and watched them being assembled and built.
He also looked at the drawings for them
the construction diagrams
so he had intimate knowledge of things like rigging
of the way in which the ship was crewed and controlled
and also the appearance of the ships themselves
the brand new fighting ship.
It is probably HMS Lenox
or possibly HMS Hampton Court
which were sister ships, built in 1677 at the same time.
So here we have this fabulous picture of this ship
in the teeth of a storm with its pennants flying
and its gun ports open.
Now in reality you wouldn't do that.
You wouldn't open your gun ports in the middle of a storm
but the artist here has taken a bit of freedom, a bit of licence
in order to demonstrate the strength of the ship
as a warship he's got those gun ports open
and the cannon are all bristling out of the side
so it is a great menacing and rather dangerous looking ship.
I suppose it is difficult for us to see these paintings
in the way in which people saw them in the 1680s.
For us they are rather quaint relics of a bygone technology
but in their day these were the equivalent of a modern day aircraft carrier
people would have looked at them in the same way
as we look at the military technology today.