13.2 Reportage or Art?
A small sample in auction catalogues of important collectors clarify the preferences of British art connoisseurs. The famous physician and collector Dr Richard Mead (1673-1754), for example, owned a large number of paintings by Titian and Rubens. Iain Pears, in his book The Discovery of Painting, calls Mead's collection a 'text book example of 18th century taste'. He is said to have had a 'disdain' for 'the favourite English wall covering of seascapes and animal pieces'.1 Nevertheless, according to the London sales catalogue of his estate, he owned 'an upright storm by Vandevelde', something like the famous painting in the Rijksmuseum [9]. But even such a subject presumably transcended the somewhat mundane level of a seafight or a ship's portrait. At the auction this storm brought a decent sum, £16-5-6. A Rubens, incidentally, went away for close to £40.2
Sir Lawrence Dundas (1712-1781) was a similar collector, best known among art historians for the 1775 portrait by Johann Zoffany, an endearing depiction in which we see him with his grandson Lawrence amid part of his collection of paintings [10]. A wealthy businessman and politician, Dundas was, among other things, one of the initiators of the Firth and Clyde Canal in Scotland. With him, too, the 'real' classical paintings dominate, Raphael, Murillo, but also Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691), who was highly sought after by British collectors. Zoffany's painting nevertheless shows several maritime pieces from his collection: two small Van de Veldes to the left and right of the chimney and, in the middle, a much larger, similar painting. That is not a Van de Velde but a work by Jan van de Cappelle (1626-1679), 'One of the most pleasing and best pictures of this master’, says the 1794 sale catalogue of his estate. The two small paintings on the left and right are both described as 'fresh breeze with shipping by Van de Veld’.3 With Dundas, then, we see no aversion to sea pieces, as with Mead, but rather a preference for maritime paintings that might just as well be considered landscapes. And in Bridgewater's Van de Velde, too, the collector seems to have been primarily concerned with the depiction of the rugged natural elements in that seascape, which served as Turner's inspiration.
Incidentally, the Van de Velde in the Bridgewater collection is a fine example of the 'art drain' from the Low Countries to England, which also applied to marine paintings. The Duke bought the canvas in the late 18th century from Amsterdam banker Henry Hope (1735-1811). He must have paid handsomely for it; in 1795 its insured value was £300.4 That disappearance of Van de Velde paintings to England had been going on for some time in the 18th century. Aelbert Cuyp and other Dutch landscape painters in particular were so in demand that people complained that almost nothing remained in their own countries. A concerned Arnold Houbraken (1660-1719) also saw Van de Velde's paintings crossing the North Sea as early as the beginning of the 18th century: ‘The English, having great esteem for the art of his brush, and deservingly so, have bought it up throughout Holland, depriving our eyes of that pleasant contemplation, and transported that art over there so that one does not see much of it here’.5
9
Willem van de Velde (II)
Driemaster in volle zee bij vliegende storm, c. 1680
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv./cat.nr. SK-A-1848
10
John Zoffany
Portrait of Sir Lawrence Dundas (c. 1710–81) with his grandson Lawrence (1766–1839), 1769-1770
Aske Hall (Richmond, Yorkshire), private collection Marquis of Zetland