| Jan van de Cappelle is considered one of seventeenth century Holland's greatest seascape painters, whose views of rivers, estuaries, and harbors with calm waters and noble ships are admired for their sensitive treatment of atmosphere,their luminosity, and the graceful play of ships and sails against the sky. van de Cappelle was certainly rich enough to paint from desire and not from necessity. His comfortable circumstances enabled him to indulge in his passion for art he amassed a great collection and the sea he owned his own boat. He was a friend of poets and artists, notably Rembrandt who paimed van de Cappelle's portrait, and Gerbrand van den Eeckhout,some of the other marine painters of his day,Simon de Vlieger,Willem van de Velde the Younger,and Hendrick Dubbels. Dates and facts regarding Jan van de Cappelle are few. Documents record his baptism in Amsterdam in 1626 the actual year of his birth is sometimes guessed to be 1625. His father was a prosperous owner of a dye works in which Jan worked intermittently his whole life. In 1653 Jan is registered as having married, and in the following year van den Eeckhout provided four lines of verse regarding van de Cappelle's drawing for the Album Amicorum of the Amsterdam poet Jacob Heyblocq, which states that Jan taught himself how to paint.In 1663 Jan and his family moved to a new home and in 1666 he became so ill that he made his will.Jan's illness may have so incapacitated him that his painting career was slowed.He died and was buried in 1679, and an inventory of his belongings was completed in 1680. Besides houses, a boat, and money, he left behind a collection of two hundred paintings and six thousand drawings, including works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Jacob Jordaens, and Elsheimer. Naturally, he also collected landscapes and marine scenes by his predecessors and contemporaries, except oddly enough, those by Jacob van Ruisdael.During his lifetime Jan painted primarily seascapes, which outnumber his winter scenes by a substantial margin. Of his surviving oeuvre about two hundred paintings, roughly two dozen are winter scenes. Twelve pictures are dated from 1644 to 1663 and none bear a date later than 1665, making a chronology difficult to establish. His known oeuvre falls within a mature phase and shows little if any development. His most productive period seems to lie in the years from 1650 to 1660, and though some suggestions have been made that his illness in 1666 permanently interrupted his output, an easel with an unfinished painting was found after his death, suggesting that he never really had stopped working. Though presumably self taught, Jan carefully studied the works of Jan Porcellis and de Vlieger whose paintings he copied. De Vlieger may have influenced Jan's adoption of the parade marine theme, which showed ships strung out in a long row a device that de Vlieger is thought to have introduced around 1649, though Jan himself may have developed the type four years earlier. Jan also studied the pen paintings of Willem van de Velde the Elder active in Amsterdam after 1639. Van de Cappelle's sensitivity to atmosphere and color, particularly in his works of the 1650s, has been universally admired, and his subtle juxtaposition of various tints anticipates the Impressionists' handling of color. Jan's winter landscapes together with the sea paintings of de Vlieger and Cuyp and the earlier works of Willem van de Velde the Younger, strike just the right balance between the source nature and the result art.Later in the century, greater artificiality creeps into Dutch painting as artists tip the scale toward greater control and formality. Like Cuyp and the others, van de Cappelle must be seen as the true source for such great English landscape painters as Turner and Constable. His immediate followers include Hcndrick Dubbels,whose work is often misattributed to van de Cappelle. |
