My favorite shipwreck painting, which I last saw at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, when it was travelling last summer, is back home at the Queen’s House, and my first order of business was to go pay the Amsterdam a visit. It’s hanging much lower in the gallery now, which means I could see some things I’d missed before.
Mainly what struck me was the large number of people in the image. I’d previously only thought about the man on the mast of the sharply-listing ship, but there are lots of other human bodies: a man praying in the upper left, another group on shore, some desperate figures aboard the sinking ship. I think there’s a more complicated social allegory here than I’d realized.
The ship is always an image of the state, and this “Amsterdam” is almost certainly the city-state itself, rather than any specific vessel. What is the painting saying about the life of the Netherlands in the late days of the Dutch Revolt against Spain?
This may sound odd but what strikes me about this painting is the color of the water. The colors create a very realistic image of sea water and looks very much like the water in Long Beach (NY) where I grew up. My earliest water experience is when I almost drowned at the age of 5. The color and the tumultuous waves in this picture brought that memory up. I think is a fitting memory and connection when looking at this painting. It brings me to think about the experience of the people on the boat and in the water trying to fight for their lives.
Although that is not a happy memory I enjoy when a painting stirs up a strong emotion in me.
I spent about 10 minutes talking with my fried Josiah Blackmore, a Professor of Portuguese lit at U of Toronto, about the color of the water in this painting last Thursday. It carries intense emotional force. And it’s hard to see in the small computer image, but there are lots of drowning or near-drowning figures in the water. Interesting stuff.
I find it fascinating that the sea and the sky are dark where the ship is going down, but that the already crashed pieces and the people drowning are bathed in light. Though the ship is beautiful, I cannot help but look at the bare rocks first. It’s almost as if the destruction is literally enlightening them, like those who face death by sea know something that those still on board the sinking ship cannot.
I see some striking comments on the state of Amsterdam within this painting. The first is that the people do not appear to be drowning, but instead working, fighting. They don’t seem to have given up. Also, against the stormy sky there are also rays of sunshine peeking through, as if to say this is a destructive storm that will leave much damage in its wake, but eventually the Dutch will make it through.
I think you’re probably right about the central ship, John, which has the three crosses of Amsterdam on her stern. But the painting also has at least 3 or 4 other ships: one to the left, already broken up on the rocks, with an image of the Virgin Mary on the stern, a flaming devil-ship in the upper right, and 1 or 2 ghostly images in the center top (maybe hard to see on the screen), which might represent other Dutch cities/ships that have already made it around the dangerous point.
It may be a political allegory about the “Dutch revolt,” in which the Protestant cities that would become the Netherlands tried, with partial success, to resist control by Catholic Spain. Amsterdam, which would become the richest city in the Dutch republic, was also a little late to the anti-Spanish side.