Description: Graphite, grey wash, 226 x 509 mm. Brown stains, a patch of blue paint in the sky near the right margin. The graphite is pressed deeply into the paper to make stronger accents, but in addition the rows of cannon on the ship in the left foreground seem to be indented. Watermark: The letters HIS.

Stylistically close to a drawing in Greenwich, The Dutch Fleet Scattered by a Gale, which according to the inscription on it depicts an incident that took place off the Dogger Bank on 30 August/9 September 1665. It records De Ruyter’s voyage to Bergen in the autumn of that year.  Willem the Elder was on board, but the Greenwich drawing could have been made afterwards, and not necessarily by him. This is even truer of the present drawing, and it is not even certain that it has anything to do with the voyage to Bergen. A number of drawings from the Dutch fleet’s visit to the waters of Norway are preserved in Rotterdam. These include both sketchy panoramas of the fleet and the coast, and more worked-out drawings, similar to Velde the Elder’s grisailles.  A grisaille is in fact preserved, half of it in Greenwich, the other half in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. A signed and dated drawing by Van de Velde the Younger in Greenwich was, according to the inscription, for a ten-foot-long painting made for Commodore Bitter in 1666. [Magnusson, Dutch Drawings no. 439]

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Willem Velde d.y. | Fartyg i storm | Nationalmuseum