convention, realism, and the interpretation of dutch and flemish tempest painting

Convention, Realism, and the Interpretation of Dutch and Flemish Tempest PaintingAuthor(s): Lawrence O. GoeddeSource: Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, Vol. 16, No. 2/3 (1986), pp.139-149Published by: Stichting voor Nederlandse Kunsthistorische PublicatiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3780634 .Accessed: 17/06/2014 09:08

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'39

Convention, realism, and the interpretation of Dutch and Flemish tempest painting

Lawrence 0. Goedde

A crucial issue in the study of Dutch seventeenth-century landscape painting is the problem of interpretation, what such images signify and how we may grasp this significance. Attempts to resolve these questions have not been completely convincing, largely because the in- ternally consistent realism of Dutch landscapes has not made them readily accessible to symbolic interpretation.' Such studies, mostly based on emblematic sources, have also foundered on the multiple and contradic- tory character of those sources. The problem of applying emblematic interpretations to landscapes comes down to the question, "Why one meaning and not another?"

I would like to offer some observations on what seems to me a feature of seventeenth-century landscape crucial to interpretation, that is its conventionality. To illustrate my points, I will discuss aspects of my study of Dutch and Flemish storm paintings,2 though I believe my con- clusions apply with suitable modifications-to the vast majority of Dutch land and seascape paintings. I should add that these comments are not offered as "the answer" to the problem of interpreting landscape, but as one component of a larger approach to reading the pictures. I should say as well that I am not concerned with offering specific readings of individual paintings but with the more fundamental issue of whether interpretation is possible at all.

It is important to consider first of all to what extent these paintings are, in fact, realistic (I use the term "realism" with its colloquial meaning of naturalism, of an imitation of the visible world). We do find in Dutch storm paintings a highly naturalistic rendering of the forces of nature and an accurate depiction of ships' tac- tics. It is apparent from contemporary sources, moreover, that the seascape painter's faithful rendering of natural phenomena and ships was viewed as a sign of his skill and the high quality of an image.3 And yet I have also found, after examining hundreds of pictures, that these painters depict only very limited aspects of human experiences of the stormy sea. This realistic but selective vision of the world is most evident when we pay attention to the situations in which ships and men are depicted, for out of all the possible ways men actually encountered the tempest we see only a few such encounters in Dutch and Flemish pictures.

We can gain a good sense of what actual life at sea was like, for we have numerous firsthand accounts of seafaring written by the Dutch voyagers, narratives of the voyages of exploration, trade, and conquest contemporary with our paintings.4 Behind these tales lies the enormous expansion of Dutch maritime power, both mercantile and military, that took place in the very years that seascapes and storm scenes began to be produced. 5

I See most notably Wilfried Wiegand, Ruisdael-Studien: ein Ver- such zur Ikonologie der Landschaftsmalerei, (diss.), Hamburg 1971. Cf. the comments in Hans Kauffmann, "Jacob van Ruisdael: 'Die Muhle von Wijk bei Duurstede'," in Festschriftrfur Otto von Simson, ed. L. Grisebach and K. Renger, Frankfurt I977, pp. 379-97, esp. p. 392, and the penetrating remarks in R. H. Fuchs, "Over het landschap: een verslag naar aanleiding van Jacob van Ruisdael, Het Korenveld," Tijd- schrift voor Geschiedenis 86 (I973), pp. 28I-92.

2 Tempest and shipwreck in the art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: dramas of peril, disaster, and salvation, (diss.), Columbia University I984.

3 See, for example, the poem of I 646 by Joachim Oudaan, "Op een onweer door Porcellis" in his Poezy, vol. 2, Amsterdam 1712, pp. II 5-

i6, and Arnold Houbraken's comments on Bonaventura Peeters in De groote schouburgh der nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, vol. 2, The Hague I753, pp. I2-I3.

4 On the accounts of the Dutch voyagers see G. A. van Es, "Reisver- halen," in F. Baur (ed.), Geschiedenis van de letterkunde der Nederlan- den, vol. 4, s'Hertogenbosch & Antwerp I948, pp. 220-41. The stan- dard bibliography is P.A. Tiele, Memoire bibliographique sur les jour- naux des navigateurs neerlandais, Amsterdam I867. Many of these narratives have been reprinted in modern editions by the Linschoten Vereeniging.

5 See C. R. Boxer, The Dutch seaborne empire, i6oo-i8oo, New York I965, and L. M. Akveld et al., Maritieme geschiedenis der Nederlanden, vol. 2, Bussum 1977.


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I40 LAWRENCE 0. GOEDDE

The paintings reflect this background and the dangers encountered in this vast enterprise.

When the paintings are compared with these accounts, however, it becomes apparent that the images rarely illustrate historical incidents. Indeed few paintings can, to my knowledge, be indisputably linked to an actual storm or wreck, though some were doubtless commissioned to commemorate such events.6 Even more significantly, where the voyagers provide detailed descriptions of the full range of catastrophe and suffe- ring wreaked by storms, the paintings avoid rendering the great majority of disasters that could and did occur. What seems to be involved here is a set of conventions that is nowhere prescribed in writing and yet persists in the works of dozens of artists through most of the seventeenth century, and persists despite major stylistic changes.

The conventionality of Dutch painting in general, and of landscapes in particular, is not a new idea. That Wolf- gang Stechow could group virtually the entire produc- tion of Dutch land and seascape into thirteen categories is in itself evidence of such conventionality.7 But I would propose that the role of convention is even greater than Stechow realized, for within any of his categories a limited number of specific themes and motifs, often in similar compositional arrangements, recur with striking regularity while others are rare or nonexistent.

In the case of tempest painting, nearly all seventeenth-century pictures of the theme can be placed into six categories in which certain features of the real world recur, while others, equally real, are excluded. These features give each type a particular range of action and emotional affect that I would contend offers access to a level of meaning intrinsic to the works themselves. It is a level of meaning that must receive serious attention in any attempt at interpretation.

To give you a sense of this conventionality I will characterize in some detail two of the six types of tempest scene, observing what is not represented as well as what is depicted, and using the accounts of the Dutch voyagers and paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to cast the selective nature of seventeenth-century pictures into sharper relief. I will consider the other four types more briefly and then discuss some of the implications of this conventionality.

One type of storm scene depicts vessels on the open sea without land in sight, as in Willem van de Velde the Younger's so-called Gust of wind of about i670 (fig. I ),8 and a painting by Claes Claesz. Wou dated I 627 (fig. 2).9 The ships in Wou's painting are scudding, running with the foresail set before the storm winds, the favored tactic in the seventeenth century.'I Van de Velde's painting depicts a tense moment, as a ship heels while apparently turning to avoid running down a small fishing boat at left. The ship has been damaged, but the vessel is still, to some degree, able to manoeuvre; she is not totally at the mercy of the tempest.

The struggle to control the ships is, in fact, central to Dutch images of ships on the open sea, for they do not depict vessels in defeat, sinking or swamping or broach- ing to towering waves. Nor are ships depicted as helpless, dismasted hulks as in the famous, now lost painting by Clarkson Stanfield of I856 titled The abandoned (fig. 3). 'I Nor do we ever see in this type the last moments of a ship as crew and passengers prepare for death, or the frantic, often vicious struggles to get into lifeboats as in Turner's Wreck of a transport ship of about i8Io (fig. 4),I 2 or the sufferings of castaways in lifeboats or rafts. And yet vivid literary descriptions of sufferings from exposure, thirst, hunger, and the resort to cannibalism were all widely available at the time, long before Geri- cault's monumental statement in the Raft of the Medusa

6 M. S. Robinson has proposed the most convincing links between individual tempest paintings and historical events. See David Cor- dingly and Westby Percival-Prescott, The art of the van de Veldes, London (National Maritime Museum) I982, nrs. II 9, 123. It is striking that these pictures are very nearly indistinguishable from paintings with no identifying attributes.

7 Wolfgang Stechow, Dutch landscape painting of the seventeenth century, London I968.

8 P.J.J. van Thiel et al., cat. All the paintings of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam & Maarssen 1976, nr. A I848.

9 Attributed to Wou by John Walsh, jan and julius Porcellis: Dutch marine painters, (diss.), Columbia University 1971, pp. I44-45.

IO F. Smekens, "Het schip bij Pieter Bruegel de Oude: een authen- ticiteitscriterium?," 3aarboek van het Koninklik Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerpen 2 (I96I), pp. 5 I-52.

ii P. T. van der Merwe, The spectacular career of Clarkson Stan- field, I793-I867: seaman, scene-painter, Royal Academician, Tyne and Wear County Council Museums 1979, nr. 308.

I2 Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The paintings of3. M. W. Turner, vol. I, New Haven & London 1977, nr. 210.



The interpretation of Dutch and Flemish tempest painting I4'

3 Clarkson Stanfield, The abandoned, i856. Present location unknown

1Willem van de Velde the Younger, The gust of wind. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

4 J. M. W. Turner, The wreck ofa transport ship. Lisbon, Funda~ao 2 Claes Claesz. Wou, Ships in a storm, i627. Providence, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design

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5 Adam Willaerts, Vessels in distress off a rocky coast, I614. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

of i8i6-17. And only rarely do ships appear on the open sea simply lying to, trying to ride out the storm. This was an extremely common situation, frequently encountered in the voyages, and vividly described by one voyager, Willem IJsbrandtsz. Bontekoe, as "op Gods genade dryven"-drifting at the mercy of God. ' 4 Once again this is exactly what most of these paintings do not show. Rather the emphasis is on human effort in the grip of ceaseless natural movement to retain control and to sail onward, to persevere.

The second type of storm scene depicts shipwreck, and again we have a frequently repeated theme handled in a highly selective manner. Shipwrecks in Dutch painting never occur on the high seas but only on coasts -and then hardly ever on sandy beaches but almost exclusively on rocky coasts. Adam Willaerts's painting of I614 (fig. 5),' and Ludolf Backhuysen's painting in Washington of I667 (fig. 6) are typical examples. Ships did, of course, sink and wreck on the high seas, '6 just as they went aground on sand bars-the shallows off the Netherlands were notoriously dangerous.7 These aspects of the realities of voyaging are, however, rarely depicted. Instead ships break up against cliffs or try to

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6 Ludolf Backhuysen, Dutch ships in a stormy sea, I667. Washington, National Gallery of Art

escape from menacing rocks back to the open sea. These two works illustrate, incidentally, the persistence of basic motifs over forty years and across a crucial shift in style.

In these images of wreck we often see ships in various stages of disaster and imminent danger-a ship in tor- ment on the rocks often serving as a warning to companion vessels of their peril, functioning in effect as a nauti- cal memento mori. They struggle to claw off the coast to regain the relative safety of the open sea, manoeuvring close to the wind that only drives them back to the deadly coast. All vessels are thus vulnerable-not all will perish, just as not all castaways die, for some come ashore- but all ships and men are desperately frail in ultimate confrontation with natural forces. The rocks give the endangered and stricken vessels and crews a special pathos, for few of the sailors in Backhuysen's picture will survive these cliffs.

In addition to the elementary terror of being dashed by the storm against these rocks, such iron-bound coasts would immediately have been identified by Dutchmen as foreign. Sometimes the shores are completely wild, or populated solely by wild animals, a very real danger in

13 Perhaps the most famous of such accounts is Willem IJs- brandtsz. Bontekoe's narrative of his voyage in an open boat after his ship exploded beneath him: Journael ofte gedenckwaerdige beschri- vinghe vande oost-indische reyse, Hoorn I646, ed. G.J. Hoogewerff, The Hague 1952 (De Linschoten Vereeniging nr. 54), pp. 26-38.

14 Ibid., pp. 143-44. i5 Van Thiel, op. cit. (note 8), nr. A I955. i6 See, for example, the account in Beschryvinghe vande voyagie om

den geheekn werelt cloot ghedaen door Olivier van Noort, Rotterdam &

Amsterdam I602, ed. J.W. IJzerman, The Hague I926 (De Linscho- ten Vereeniging nr. 27), pp. I5-i6, and that by Bontekoe, op. cit. (note I3), pp. 173-75.

I7 Sir William Temple, for example, observed that "the entrance of the Tessel and passage over the Zudder-Sea is more dangerous than a voyage from there to Spain, lying all in blind and narrow channels;" Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands, ed. G. N. Clark, Oxford 1972, p. io8.



The interpretation of Dutch and Flemish tempest painting '43

7 Bonaventura Peeters, Shipwreck on a northern coast. Dieppe, Musee Municipal

seventeenth-century minds (fig. 7)' 8 Sometimes, as in the Dieppe wreck scene by Bonaventura Peeters of about I655, the Scandinavian coast is suggested, while in a shipwreck by Jan Abrahamsz. Beerstraten (fig. 8), a Mediterranean locale is indicated by the round stone tower, an arched gate, and a friar with a cross minister- ing to the castaways. In other images Indians, notorious as cannibals, set the scene in the Americas, as in a painting by Jan Peeters, now in Vienna (fig. 9). I 9

These indications of setting are not, however, accurate topographical studies. Rather they act affectively to associate the place of mortal peril and potential deliver- ance with the distant, the unfamiliar, sometimes the wild and the savage. Thus man is thrown on the mercy of the unknown, vast world that the great voyages of exploration had opened up to the European imagination. Pee- ters' unlikely combination of a Turkish galley, Dutch ships, and Indians dressed in skins indicates how little concern there was for historical accuracy, but how very vividly the danger of that distant world had penetrated men's consciousness through seafaring.

The shipwreck type thus depicts not all the places where disaster was possible, nor all the ways in which it could occur, nor all the sufferings possible. The result is a range of affective incident distinctly different from the depiction of ships on the open sea. Instead of control and perseverance, we encounter desperate weakness, mortal

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lee shores, that is coasts towards which storm winds are blowing and from which vessels seek to escape. This type possesses a distinctive tension, for the catastrophe, as in a I672 picture by Willem van de Velde the Younger (fig. io),20 will occur only in the future or, as in a painting attributed to Simon de Vlieger (fig. i i), is only por- tended by the looming mass of rocks beaten by the waves. These are images of warning rather than accom- plished disaster.

A fourth, extremely rare type, exemplified by Jan Porcellis's painting of I63I in the Mauritshuis, is most unusual in depicting shipwreck on a typical Dutch beach (fig. I2). 21 That it did not become popular reveals most tellingly the non-documentary character of these pictures. A fifth type, the thunderstorm over local waters, does not depict a full sea storm but rough weather over shallow coastal regions (fig. 13).22 The depiction of lightning rendered in long fluid strokes of yellow or red is one of this type's most distinctive features, lending these images a brooding emotional suggestiveness. Also relatively rare is the sixth type, the gathering storm, exemplified here by Jacob van Ruisdael's Looming storm (fig. 14).23 In this type, beacons rather than the vessels are often protagonists whose function as navigational signs, as guides to channel and harbor entrances, makes their dramatic isolation in these paintings, just as boats drive in to shore before the storm, pregnant with significance.

I should add that human response to the tempest is not the only conventionalized aspect of these works, for nature too is treated conventionally. Dutch artists insist on dialectical tensions between man and nature, between light and dark, sea and clouds, waves and rocks. Each element is given a distinct identity and set in oppo-

2o This picture by van de Velde could also be classed as a shipwreck scene because the distinction between the shipwreck and threat types is often a matter of emphasis rather than a precise demarcation. In this case the painting includes a wreck but the protagonist is the vessel in danger struggling to escape rather than the more distant, less promi- nent ship already breaking up on shore. It should be emphasized that this typology is an analytical tool of my own devising for the purpose of classifying the varied events depicted in the pictures, and not a set of rigid formulas.

2I H. R. Hoetink, Illustrated general catalogue, The Hague (Mau- ritshuis) '977, nr. 969.

22 Hans Ulrich Beck, Jan van Goyen, I596-i656, vol. 2, Amster- dam I973, nr. 833.

23 Seymour Slive and H. R. Hoetink, exhib. cat. Jacob van Ruisdael, The Hague (Mauritshuis) I98I, nr. 27.



The interpretation of Dutch and Flemish tempest painting I45

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15 J. M. W. Turner, Snow storm: steam-boat offa harbour's mouth, I842. London, Tate Gallery

sition to the other, seemingly interpenetrating and un- dermining each other. We know from Turner, however, that the storm can just as validly be rendered by a total blurring of sea, sky, and clouds, with the signs of man dissolving in a universal flux (fig. 15).24

While I could elaborate this survey of tempest types and patterns of representation, I believe it is clear that what we encounter in these paintings are at once naturalistic and conventionalized descriptions of human situations and of nature. I venture to suggest that a similar analysis of most Dutch land and seascapes would reveal a similar degree of conventionality.

I would like to consider now the ways these conventions offer vital access to the content of the pictures. First, the very existence of conventions allows us to dis- pense with a most troublesome, indeed crippling, concept for interpretation the idea of "pure landscape," of images that are solely imitative in a neutral way. While this commonplace notion testifies to the imitative prow- ess of Netherlands artists, the idea also reflects the wide- spread, traditional view that the realism of Dutch landscapes is comprehensive and objective. Selective patterns of representation, however, decisively contradict the concept that Dutch landscape consists of a program- matic reproduction of the world. So too, this conventionality conclusively corrects the idea that Dutch land-

scape involves a neutral,value-free or objective record- ing of appearances on the model of scientific observation and description.25 From a scientific viewpoint (for example, an interest in topographical record-making) such selectivity of representation can only be viewed as arbitrary and capricious. The pictures display every sign of being imaginative constructs, products of the mind re- working experience and artistic tradition, rather than map-like or veduta-like reports of appearances.

Secondly, recognizing conventions offers an important guide for interpretation, because it provides access to a level of content intrinsic to the images themselves. It is not an applied or exterior or concealed meaning, but a significance readable in what the artist chose for depiction. Such patterns of selective representation are in- herently interpretive, by which I do not mean to imply a necessarily conscious awareness of the content on either the artist's part or that of his audience. Even when fol- lowed thoughtlessly, a convention or formula communi- cates meaning and can be analyzed for evidence of what contemporaries expected to see and what they found significant and worthy of representation out of all the multiple possibilities of existence. An analysis of such conventions can provide entry into the content of a broad theme in Dutch painting. In the case of storm- scapes we are able to see a consistent and coherent interpretation of nature in an extreme mood, and of man's capacity in extremis.

One example of this interpretive rendering is the depiction of men and their ships as frail and vulnerable and yet essential to the coherence of these compositions. Imagined without vessels, most of these paintings become inert, for the intricate lines of the vessels and the implied motion of the ships both reinforce and counter the diagonals and curves of the natural world. In this connection it is striking to see that a man or a ship is rarely alone, and even more revealing is the fact that no tempest picture of the seventeenth century perhaps no finished landscape painting of the time lacks human presence. In contrast, such nineteenth-century artists as Gustave Courbet, Winslow Homer (fig. i6), and Tho- mas Moran painted storms in which artist and viewer

24 Butlin and Joll, op. cit. (note I2), nr. 398. The full title of this painting is Snow storm steam-boat off a harbour's mouth making sig- nals in shallow water, and going by the lead. The author was in this storm on the night the Ariel left Harwich.

25 In the light of the conventionalitq and also of the dramatic ex-

ploitation of realism seen in these pictures, Svetlana Alpers' provoca- tive thesis that Dutch painting is best understood by analogy with the new science, and Dutch landscape specifically by analogy with map- making, is fundamentally unpersuasive: The art of describing: Dutch art in the seventeenth century, Chicago I983, ch. 4.




personally confront the storm from the beach or the deck of a ship.26 Their pictures imply an individual consciousness standing alone before the enormous other- ness of nature with all the tensions arising from man's identification with and separation from the world out- side the self.27 But the world of seventeenth-century sea and landscape is accessible to man and proper to him-no matter how forbidding, furious and perilous.

Another interpretive feature of these images is the rendering of natural violence in terms of polar opposi- tions reflecting for a contemporary fundamental patterns of antagonism in the four elements.28 These polar- ities, however, also serve to make the images comprehensive, including all possibilities of the universe, for the images are not simply negative but tensional. They embrace the full potential of nature, even including inti- mations of calm and harmony in bursts of daylight and blue sky.29 The paintings further suggest this larger cos- mos in their formal structures, which are full of restless energy but also dynamic balances and echoing patterns of land and sea in the clouds. These elemental antago- nists, so opposed in movement, form and texture, in the end possess an essential kinship and harmony deeper than the discord that sends them crashing against each other.

If a study of conventions reveals such overarching patterns of significance, it can also allow us to identify the preoccupations of a particular artist. In the case of Porcellis, for example, our awareness of conventional patterns allows us to recognize that this painter eschews the exotic, foreign and hyper-dramatic, transferring shipwreck from the conventional remote rocky shores to the local beach and depicting not a full storm but its aftermath, a more meditative and subtle moment typical of his work. Similarly, we can recognize that Jacob van Ruisdael characteristically avoids depicting full-blown storms, preferring instead brooding thunderstorms or

i6 Winslow Homer, Northeaster, I895. New York, Metropolitan Museum

ominous gathering tempests. Finally, identifying the conventions of tempest paint-

ing permits us to see how closely the paintings corres- pond to and dramatize traditional and likewise conventional ideas about storms expressed in a literary tradition of narrative and symbolism. A full discussion of the relationship of the paintings to poetry, drama and scripture exceeds the scope of this paper, but two observations should be made here. First, the paintings do not illustrate texts, although their conventions are analogous to the conventions of literary tempests. These analogous features include a highly dramatized rendering of abso- lutely opposing forces in nature, forces that push human beings to the limits of experience; a psychologically dynamic address, indeed, a rhetorical appeal, to viewer and reader, drawing him into the turmoil of the storm; and a larger, cosmic tension of storm and elemental harmony.30

Secondly, metaphor is also conventional and integral to this literary tradition. Of course, the presence of conventions in the paintings does not of itself prove the

76 For seascapes by Courbet see exhib. cat. Gustave Courbet (i8i9- i877), Paris (Grand Palais) 1977, nrs. 88-89, II2, 117. For Winslow Homer's Northeaster see Gordon Hendricks, The life and work of Winslow Homer, New York I979, nr. CI-517. On Thomas Moran see Roger B. Stein, Seascape and the American imagination, New York 1975, pp. II2, 117.

27 On the sublime and its relation to eighteenth and nineteenth- century landscape see Samuel H. Monk, The sublime, New York 1935, esp. pp. I-I7, 203-32. See also Andrew Wilton, Turner and the sublime, Toronto (Art Gallery of Ontario) I980, esp. pp. 65-I05, 145-64; and

Stein, op. cit. (note 26), pp. 40-5 I, I I I-23. 28 Concerning the elements and cosmology see S. K. Heninger, The

cosmographical glass, San Marino (Cal.) i977, esp. pp. I06-I1, and. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The breaking of the circle: studies in the effect of the "New Science" upon seventeenth-century poetry, rev. ed., New York & London I962, pp. I-46.

29 Cf. the suggestive discussions in Fuchs, op. cit. (note I), pp. 289- 92, and Lisa Vergara, Rubens and the poetics of landscape, New Haven & London I982, pp. 43-55.

30 These matters are discussed at length in my dissertation.




17 Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom Ships in a tempest British private collection

I7 Hendrick Cornelisz. Vroom, Ships in a tempest. British private collection

existence of a corresponding symbolic content. Conven- tionality, however, manifests a predisposition to seek in a situation or experience the typical and the general, that which fits a pattern of meaning. This tendency of thought is also manifest in what Marjorie Hope Nicol- son terms "the habit of thinking in terms of universal analogy" that underlies symbolic interpretation.3' This habit of mind, which depends upon the pre-scientific view of the world, also functions in terms of a search for significant patterns and types in which microcosms, including man himself, mirror and reproduce the fullness of a purposeful creation.

A number of sources provide suggestive evidence that these pictures could be and were interpreted metaphor- ically, but I would propose that conventionality of narrative and form in itself implies the capacity for bearing metaphorical significance similar to that found in emblems and other interpretive sources. At the same time I would contend that this conventionality also provides a check to arbitrary symbolic interpretation of these pictures, because choices of subject matter, narrative events, and their relationships within the formal struc-

ture are, as we have seen, significant. Such features cer- tainly conveyed meaning to beholders in a culture ac- customed to looking for and finding details and patterns that fit conventional, universal categories.32 Symbolic readings should work with both the repetitive patterns and the deviations from the norm.

Thus it is arbitrary for us to apply a single marine metaphor to a single feature of a painting without con- sidering the conventional role of that feature and its specific place in a given picture. Hendrick Vroom's Storm (fig. I7), for instance, if separated from its pairing with a painting depicting the Battle of Cadiz, cannot be read exclusively as the Dutch ship of state with any more validity than as a metaphor for an individual's life.33 There are no corroborating symbols in the image itself. In the light of contemporary sources it is, moreover, necessary to offer metaphorical readings that take into account the implications of the entire scene: this includes the ship that sails onward, undaunted despite a storm, monsters, and the threat embodied in a dismasted, helpless companion vessel at left (probably drifting to a sea anchor) as well as the ship smashing on

3I Nicolson, op. cit. (note 28), p. I9. 32 The same habit of mind is evident in the representation of real

history through typology and allegory in seventeenth-century Dutch history painting. See H. van de Waal, Drie eeuwen vaderlandsche geschied-uitbeelding, I5oo-i8oo: een iconologische studie, vol. i, The

Hague 1952, PP. I-I7 and, with reference to land and seascape, pp. 50- 52.

33 M. Russell, Visions of the sea: Hendrick Vroom and the origins of Dutch marine painting, Leiden I983, pp. I 54, 2I0-I I. Russell's asser- tion (p. II 5) that Vroom's storm pictures are primarily symbolic in character and symbolize specifically the ship of state cannot be ac- cepted for exactly the reasons given here.




the rocks at right. The central ship cannot be isolated and interpreted without regard to the entire context. To take another example in this painting, isolating a single feature such as the rocks and reading them as metaphors of endurance and virtue, a common motif in emblems, is totally inappropriate to their conventional dramatic role in the larger composition where they function as means of destruction or portend mortal peril.34

The multiplicity of symbolic readings in the sources and the quite unexpected character of many metaphors also requires that we not make exclusive claims to the validity of a single interpretation. Land and seascapes were looked at in many contexts and for varying periods of time, from a brief glance to a prolonged meditation, and by people of varying backgrounds and dispositions, making it impossible to be dogmatic about the signific-

ance contemporary beholders perceived in these works. Our interpretation must be guided by the content of an individual picture itself and by its relationship to the conventions to which it conforms or from which it devi- ates, and in either case through which it communicated.

"Mere convention," as we sometimes dismissively term it, is thus a methodological tool that offers access to a level of intrinsic content in land and seascapes. It offers one avenue into the complex of experience that shaped the pictures, and it provides a means of experiencing the world of the imagination that the pictures evoke.

MCINTIRE DEPARTMENT OF ART

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

34 The cliffs in a shipwreck scene by Jacob Adriaensz. Bellevois are interpreted as symbols of virtue in exhib. cat. Die Sprache der Bilder:

Realitat und Bedeutung in der niederlandischen Malerei des I7. Jahr- hunderts, Braunschweig (Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum) 1978, p. 46.



Article Contentsp. 139p. 140p. 141p. 142p. 143p. 144p. 145p. 146p. 147p. 148p. 149

Issue Table of ContentsSimiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, Vol. 16, No. 2/3 (1986), pp. 91-216Front MatterForeword: On Tradition and Innovation [pp. 91-92]Thoughts, Old and New, on the Sources of Early Netherlandish Painting [pp. 93-112]Lessons for Ladies: A Selection of Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Dutch Prints [pp. 113-127]The Prodigal Son in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Art: Depictions of the Parable and the Evolution of a Catholic Image [pp. 128-138]Convention, Realism, and the Interpretation of Dutch and Flemish Tempest Painting [pp. 139-149]Symbol and Meaning in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance [pp. 150-169]Response to James Marrow [pp. 170-172]The Debate on Symbol and Meaning in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Art: An Appeal to Common Sense [pp. 173-187]Response to Peter Hecht [pp. 188-190]Back Matter [pp. 191-216]

convention, realism, and the interpretation of dutch and flemish tempest painting

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