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Mesdag excels in marines, painting great sweep of waters with breadth and simplicity. His palette is cool and restrained, his rhythmic sense well developed, and his feeling for outdoors truly Dutch. He belongs to the line of the classic Dutch marinists, to Van der Velde, Backhuizen, and Van Goyen. His wife, a woman of charm and culture, died in the spring of last year.
"The palm," says Lord Orford, "is not less disputed with Raffaelle for history, than with Van de Velde for sea-pieces." He died in 1707. Like his father, the younger Van de Velde designed everything from nature, and his compositions are distinguished by a more elegant and tasteful arrangement of his objects, than is to be found in the productions of any other painter of marines.
But in time a fusion with the Dutch became inevitable. Then, in Holland, as was the case with England and Germany, many refugees, abjuring their nationality, changed their French names into Dutch. The Leblancs called themselves De Witt, the Deschamps, Van de Velde, the Dubois, Van den Bosch, the Chevaliers, Ruyter, the Legrands, De Groot, etc. etc.
Among his masterpieces, 'Cattle of all kinds in a meadow surrounded by rocks, and watered by a cascade; a horseman giving alms to a peasant boy; and his celebrated 'Charlatan, full of observation and humour, are in the Louvre. Adrian Van de Velde, born in 1639, died in 1672, the younger brother of a great marine painter, ranks almost as high as Paul Potter in cattle painting.
On days of a certain atmosphere, when the trace of the Middle Age comes out, like old marks in the stones in rainy weather, I seemed actually to have seen the tortured figure there to have met Denys l'Auxerrois in the streets. It was a winter-scene, by Adrian van de Velde, or by Isaac van Ostade.
The figures in his pictures, in excellent keeping, were often introduced by Adrian Van de Velde. Van der Heyden's productiveness as a painter was lessened by the circumstance that his mechanical talent led him to make an invention by which the construction of the fire-engines of his day was greatly improved.
Here are Tenierses, full of riotous life; exquisite Metzus, Terburgs, and Gerard Dows; cattle by Paul Potter; ships by Van de Velde; skies by Cuyp; landscapes, with white horses, by Wouvermanns; driving clouds and shadow-darkened plains by Ruysdael, who, though he died in a workhouse, yet lives in his pictures in kings' palaces.
He stood to this branch of Dutch art in the same relation that Ruysdael did to landscape and William Van de Velde to seascape. He is famous for his canal banks by moonlight, and fine disposal of broad masses of shadow. After his moonlights come his sunsets, conflagrations, and winter scenes. He rarely painted full daylight. He sometimes painted on the same Van der Neer in the National Gallery.
Given under our privy-seal, at our palace of Westminster, the 20th day of February, in the 26th year of our reign." Many of the large pictures of sea-fights in England, and doubtless in Holland, bearing the signature W. van de Velde, and generally attributed to the son, were executed by him from the designs of his father.
He did not study painting till he had followed a trade up to the age of eighteen years; he then gave himself with ardour to art, making many studies of skies, coasts, and vessels. He was inferior to William Van de Velde in his colouring, which was heavy, with a cold effect. But he had in full a Dutch painter's truthfulness, while his 'stormy waves and rent clouds' are given with poetic feeling.
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