excellently are the groups and figures depicted! This is not true etcher’s work; but it is very skilful work, very good work, of its kind.
Neither Van der Heyden, nor any of the Dutch painters of architecture, realised the capacity of outlines in stone or brick, attended by their circumstance of light and shadow, to impress the imagination, to stir emotion, as Méryon was to do later. But their work, by its soberness and firm simplicity, wins us. In its own way, and in its own degree, it will always give pleasure.
IX
From Holland, the first naval power in Europe of the seventeenth century, a love of the sea and an expression of it in art were naturally to be expected: and among the several fine painters who now for the first time made the sea their subject, two at least, Reynier Zeeman and Ludolph Backhuysen, have left some admirable etchings. Simon de Vlieger painted, but did not etch marine subjects; of Jan van de Capelle only three indifferent plates are known; and Willem van de Velde did not etch at all.
Zeeman’s real name was Nooms; but his love of the sea procured him early the name which he adopts on all his plates. He travelled much, but worked chiefly at Amsterdam, where probably he was born in 1623.
Zeeman’s etchings are nearly all in sets, representing views of Amsterdam, different kinds of Dutch shipping, and naval battles. They passed through the hands of several publishers, who, we may conjecture, commissioned him to do them: and they were evidently popular. Such work, nominally and primarily intended to serve a literary rather than a pictorial purpose, suffers in consequence. The artist has had to choose his subjects with a view to those whose interest was not in the etcher as etcher, but in his knowledge of ships and skill in depicting them.
Yet Zeeman has managed to serve art as well as history. Ships, with their ordered intricacy of rigging and their mysterious beauty, have an endless fascination for him: for it is shipping, rather than the sea itself, which he loves. And his ships are etched with an admirable feeling, a simple and effective handling of the bitten lines. His men of war move with royal stateliness; and the battle-pieces have something of the magnificence one imagines in the old sea-fights. Equally good in their way are plates like the fishing boats (Fig. 19) setting out at morning over the still sea, bathed in a wash of limpid air and sunshine. Only in his clouds does Zeeman completely fail. Historically, too, these prints are interesting. Here, with patriotic pride, Zeeman is fond of showing the English ship of the line or frigate, with her sails riddled, conquered at last, and with the Dutch tricolour hoisted over the St. George’s Cross. Nothing could more
Fig. 19.—Fishing Boats. By R. Zeeman. B. 38.
vividly bring home to Englishmen the powerful position of Holland at the time.