How two Dutchmen introduced marine art to Britain

In March 1675 the Keeper of His Majesty’s Lodgings at Greenwich received an order for ‘Three pairs of shutters for the three windows in a lower room, at the Queen’s building next to the park (where the Dutch painters work’). Willem van de Velde and his son, also called Willem, would have preferred a studio with north light, but they weren’t complaining. They had been put on a retainer of £100 a year by Charles II – with an additional £50 from James, Duke of York – for the father to draw ‘Draughts of Sea Battles’ and the son to turn ‘said Draughts into Colours’.

Turner claimed that an image of a storm-tossed vessel by Willem the Younger had made him a painter

It was a step up for a pair of economic migrants who had left their country when the 1672 ‘Year of Disaster’ crashed the Dutch economy and taken up an opportunistic invitation from the British government for enemy aliens with valuable skills – especially maritime – to settle in England on the promise of tax advantages and freedom from press gangs.