Cornelis Verbeeck

(circa 1590-circa 1631 Amsterdam)

The Battle of Gibraltar

Footnotes

Provenance
Collection of Alfred Thieme (1830-1906), Leipzig
Collection of Theodor Stroefer (1843-1927), Nuremberg
His sale, Böhler, Munich, 28 October 1937, lot 3 (as Aert van Antum, with dimensions of 23 x 33cm)
Sale, Lempertz, Cologne, 19 November 1994, lot 1457 (as Cornelis Verbeeck, with dimensions of 23 x 33cm)
Collection of Hugo Christiaan Beyerman (1919-2008), Switzerland
His sale, Schuler, Zurich, 6-10 December 2010, lot 4447
With Hoogsteder and Hoogsteder, The Hague, 1997, where purchased in 2014 by
Mr and Mrs Anthony Inder Rieden
Collection of a Family Trust

Exhibited
The Hague, Bredius Museum, 10 December 2019 - 1 March 2020

Literature
J. Walsh Jr, Jan and Julius Porcellis, Dutch Marine Painters, New York, 1971, p.179, no.A9, fig.31 (as Jan Porcellis)
G. de Beer, The Golden Age of Dutch Marine Paintings. The Inder Rieden Collection, Leiden, 2019, vol. 1, pp. 260-275, cat.no. 8, ill.

The present lot commemorates the Battle of Gibraltar of 1607, which has long-since been considered one of the greatest achievements of the Dutch naval force during the Eighty Years' War. Despite the Dutch being outnumbered in guns and lacking the heavily armed warships, known as galleons, that the Spanish squadrons boasted, the Dutch were able to enact a spectacular defeat of the Spanish in their own waters. The entire Spanish fleet and 2,000 – 4,000 men perished, whilst the Dutch only suffered 100 casualties. As such, the battle became a popular subject for Dutch Golden Age marine painters. The Battle of Gibraltar in 1607 by Cornelis Claesz. van Wieringen (see fig. 1), for example, perfectly illustrates the drama with which artists would represent the battle; Spanish figures are tossed easily into the air as a Dutch ship barges into a much larger Spanish vessel in a show of Dutch strength.

It is through a series of hints and suggestions that the present battle has been identified as that of Gibraltar. The ships themselves remain anonymous, but flags reveal them as Dutch (including specifically from Amsterdam) and Spanish. As explored by Gerlinde de Beer, comparison with representations of the battle by van Wieringen has been particularly helpful in identifying the battle, and particularly his The Modello of the Battle of Gibraltar, currently in the Het Scheepwartmuseum, Amsterdam. Van Wieringen's modello departs from the usual bird's eye view of the action, and instead uses a low vantage point with use of linear perspective, and the ships neatly arranged into rows. Verbeeck borrows this challenging compositional arrangement and incorporates it into his small scale (a format he specialised in) depiction of the battle, demonstrating his sure hand not to depict a specific historic moment in the battle, but rather to commemorate an overarching event of Dutch naval power.

The present lot has previously been attributed to Jan Porcellis and although it does have some stylistic similarities to Porcellis's work (for example in the wave formations), this attribution has now been rejected. Approximately 11cm, presumably an old extension, appears to have been removed from the upper edge of the present work at some point after the 1994 sale.