It also meant a greater degree of naturalism. When, at the beginning of the century, painters depicted the sea with a high horizon line, it implied a higher vantage point. The bird’s-eye - or God’s-eye - view caused life below to resolve into distant-looking patterns. Human drama lost its bite, its immediacy. The sea became a kind of decorative carpet, rather than the active and often ferocious protagonist it would become in paintings made a few decades later.
“The Golden Age of Dutch Seascapes’’ comes to Salem from England’s National Maritime Museum, which has the finest collection of Dutch and Flemish seascapes outside Holland. The exhibition could hardly have a more appropriate US venue: Maritime painting, and all other things maritime, are everywhere in evidence at the PEM. Its galleries are filled with objects relating not only to ships and the sea, but all the economic and cultural ramifications of seafaring (and even surfing, thanks to the current Joni Sternbach exhibit) through the centuries.
“No country in the world had as many ships as the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century,’’ writes curator Remmelt Daalder in the catalog.
Holland was involved in wars all through the 17th century. But only a fraction of Holland’s vessels were warships. The majority were involved in commerce, which took the Dutch all over the globe. It’s strange, then, that only a smattering of paintings during the Golden Age depicted what Daalder calls “the simple work horses of the maritime economy, the robust merchant fluyts or the many smaller vessels that sailed the coast and inland waterways.’’
Instead, artists and their clients preferred paintings of naval battles, faraway oceans, and the richly ornamented warships that established Dutch dominance at sea.
