FIRE roared above the waters during the battle of Scheveningen, off the coast of the Netherlands, on August 10, 1653, as Britain fought the Dutch Republic for the right to rule the seas. Sketching furiously from a galliot, as cannonballs flew above his head, ships sank and men drowned around him, was a Dutch draughtsman: Willem van de Velde the Elder. ‘He was flying under a Dutch flag and part of his role was, yes, to record the battles, but also, on occasion, to deliver messages—so he was absolutely in the thick of it,’ says Allison Goudie, curator of Art (pre-1800) at the Royal Museums Greenwich, which has the world’s largest collection of van de Velde artwork (www.rmg.co.uk). ‘We have a depiction of the battle where van de Velde included himself in his small boat. You can actually see this little figure with his broad-brimmed hat sitting there, in the midst of all these much larger warships. It really gives you a sense of how challenging it must have been.’
Miraculously, he survived and, with his son Willem the Younger, went on to become one of the most prominent artists in Stuart Britain. The van de Veldes didn’t
