MARBLEHEAD — It's a big world, but not so big that a country's rivals are willing to share it. The Dutch found that out starting around 1600. One of the smallest European nations, they'd nonetheless established a trading empire stretching from the East Indies to New York (New Amsterdam).
They had to fight to protect it. You can still picture the battles, wooden warships like floating forts, sterns intricately carved and flecked with gold, cannon booming smoke and fire, the enemy swimming, flailing for anything that floats while their ships disappear beneath them.
You can picture it so well because it was a subject dear to Dutch and Flemish artists. More than that, their skill at capturing the ocean's many moods grew more and more sophisticated, if not spectacular, as years passed.
Seeing that development is only a part of a dramatic new exhibit of 70 historic paintings offered by the Peabody Essex Museum. "The Golden Age of Dutch Seascapes" runs from Saturday to Sept. 7 and reflects the roughly 100 years of Holland's time as a world sea power.
In addition, the museum is offering a live demonstration of what it takes to maintain 400-year-old paintings. Conservator Teresa Carmichael will be in the gallery working on the restoration of a PEM-owned seascape even as visitors watch or ask questions about the painstaking work.
In the beginning, explains Dan Finamore, the Peabody Essex Museum's Russell W. Knight curator of maritime art and history, Dutch artists saw the sea as "purely the platform," a flat, blue plane on which to depict vessels and frame the land.
Rather quickly, their vision took them deeper and canvases soon burst with color. The sun penetrated mists or came in lightninglike shafts parting clouds and playing on the waters, turning them blue, or sparkling white or green, even shades of sandy brown, the waves roiling, roaring, spraying.
"You can positively feel it," Finamore says. The modern "seascape," he adds, started here.
The artists who performed this magic became famous all over Europe. Even when Holland's traders began to be eclipsed by the English, these Dutch painters crossed the channel, hiring out to British buyers. Henry VIII was an early customer.
"(The English) have been collecting this art for a long time," Finamore says.
This explains why the bulk of this exhibit includes paintings on loan not from Holland, but from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England.
For that matter, Finamore says, the works have never been displayed to such advantage. In Greenwich, by necessity they are hung in a great home turned museum. It lacks modern lighting and space. By contrast, the PEM provides an opportunity to lean right in and clearly see incredible things. Finamore shakes his head when he discusses the level of detail.
"The more you look at these pictures, the more you see," he says.
In one frame, the artist offers a bit of humor — the tiny face of a seasick sailor vomiting off a storm-tossed stern, or (in Bonaventura Peeters the "Elder's Seascape With Sailors Sheltering From a Rainstorm") close examination reveals a crewman onshore lifting a hogshead of drink to his lips, oblivious to his grounded boat.
Not all the paintings depict actual events. Sometimes they offer hyper-realistic images of ships skirting rocky shores while fighting a pounding sea. Here, Finamore says, "everything about the sea is highly symbolic."
The dramatic "Wreck of the Amsterdam," for example, begs a multitude of questions (including the identity of the painter). It shows several wrecks. Or is it several stages of one wreck, Finamore asks. Does it depict a vision of the ship of state in peril? Or "the voyage of life?" On shore, the survivors pray.
Mostly, the paintings can be appreciated in a straightforward way. Simple people are clamming or fishing in Julius Procellis' "Mussell Fishing" or in "Fisherman on Shore Hauling in Their Nets" — tableaus that look wonderfully familiar to a modern viewer. Some works depict Dutch East India Company ships entering exotic ports from the Baltic to the Mediterranean.
Several paintings record massive warships trading cannon blasts, including the giant "Gouden Leeuw at the Battle of the Texel" by Willem Van de Velde the Younger, a grippingly vivid scene of Dutch men-of-war holding off a combined British and French fleet.
Nearby is a bigger-than-life portrait of that battle's impatient hero Lt. Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, painted by Ferdinand Bol, a student of Rembrandt. The extraordinary realism of the work shows the master's influence.
Also, a beautifully rendered 400-year-old map of the world is surprisingly accurate — an African lake is placed near enough to Lake Victoria to believe that the cartographer had somehow heard of just such a feature — farther on, Australia is dubbed New Holland, offering a reminder of who discovered the place and just how far Dutch paintbrushes once reached.
