Captured English Ships after the Four Days’ Battle by Willem van de Velde the Younger

Willem van de Velde the Younger painted Captured English Ships after the Four Days Battle in 1666, the year the battle was fought. It was a decisive Dutch victory in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, fought over four days in June. Now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Look at the central ship: its hull is battered by cannon fire, smoke still rising from the gun deck. The gilded stern decoration marks it as an English flagship, now captured. A cannonball splashes into the sea mid-frame, a moment when the fighting has barely stopped.

Van de Velde was thirty-two. He came from a family of marine painters. His father specialized in naval scenes and his brother painted landscapes. The sea was the family trade.

This is not a painting of battle. It is what follows: captured ships, settling smoke, the sea still churning. A naval painter recording a Dutch victory.