A fluit and other vessels in a light breeze, possibly on the IJ with the gallows at Volewijk beyond - a penschilderij

With Willem van de Velde the Elder, Experiens Sillemans was among the earliest of Dutch artists to specialise in the production of paintings in pen and ink on prepared supports known as penschilderijen. This remarkable fusion of painting and drawing found continued resonance among subsequent generations of artists, including both Ludolf Bakhuizen and Adriaen Cornelisz. van Salm, the latter of whom continued the tradition into the early decades of the eighteenth century. The son of an English immigrant to Amsterdam, Sillemans was generally described in contemporary documents as an ‘engraver’, though in 1642 one identifies his occupation as ‘engraver and draughtsman’. He chiefly provided book illustrations, including, for example, three excellent images for the 1642 edition of Jacob Cats’ Houwelyck. A remarkable pair of documents dated 16 and 19 April of that year describe how a few days earlier a cannon was fired from the ship De Pelgrim as it came upon the Montelbaanstoren, seriously damaging Sillemans’ house and ‘shop’ and nearly taking him out as well. Perhaps on account of his geographic proximity to these ships, by the late 1640s Sillemans had begun to produce penschilderijen of marine subjects, the earliest dated example of which is his Ships in a Harbour dated 1649 (fig. 1; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum).

Owing to his short period of activity producing such works, Sillemans’ pen paintings are extremely rare. Perhaps only around twenty or so such works are extant, roughly half of which bear dates between 1649 and 1652 and the vast majority of which are today in public collections. The present painting appears to be one of a pair or works that are the only known paintings by Sillemans on copper (they remained together until at least the middle of the twentieth century, before being separated) and quite possibly the only penschilderijen by any artist executed on this support.

In a 1984 article for Print Quarterly, David Freedberg, Aviva Burnstock and Alan Phenix identified the remarkable method by which Sillemans developed many of his penschilderijen. Following technical examination of two Sillemans panels, the authors described the artist’s working method as follows:

‘[H]e used a method of counter-proofing to produce at least some of the elements within his pictures; that the surface, thus printed – and not drawn or painted – was then added to or gone over in pen and ink, as well as with the brush (particularly in the washed areas); and that instead of printing from an impression of a single plate, he must have used separate pieces of printed paper (either cut up from a single impression or made from small pieces of etched copper plates) to print individual figures, ships and boats in different positions’ (D. Freedberg, A. Burnstock and A. Phenix, ‘Paintings or Prints? Experiens Sillemans and the Origins of the Grisaille Sea-piece: Notes on a Rediscovered Technique*,’ Print Quarterly, I, 1984, p. 161).

Evidence of this process in the present painting can be found in a pair of works on panel which largely depict the same composition, the first of which is today in the collection of the Amsterdam Museum while a second was formerly on the Rotterdam art market. The painting in Amsterdam is nearly identical in composition, save the addition of a vessel in the central middle ground in lieu of the gallows that appear in both the present painting and the one whose location today is unknown. These details were likely added by hand with pen and ink, while the larger ships at left and right would have been made through the counter-proofing process outlined above. The painting in Amsterdam was acquired in 1981 together with another work of identical size depicting men collecting and loading salt, perhaps on the Cape Verde Islands off the western coast of Africa, that is presumed to be its pendant (inv. no. SA 38185). That painting is known in a further version in the collection of Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam (inv. no. A.0076). Sillemans appears to have produced such pendants on several further occasions, and, on account of its probable association with one of the pair in the 1951 sale, the present example likely once had a mate, too.

Sillemans’ extensive use of the counter-proofing technique finds artistic parallels in the works of other artists in the period. Both the elder and younger Willem van de Velde frequently employed the technique in their drawings, improving their counter-proofs at a later stage or ‘finalising’ them with the application of grey washes. Around the same time, Jan van der Heyden began to use printing techniques to make what Bernardus de Bosch Jer.z. described at the turn of the nineteenth century as prentschilderijen, or ‘print-paintings’ (for an in-depth study of van der Heyden’s mysterious technique, see A. Wallert, ‘Refined Technique or Special Tricks: Painting Methods of Jan van der Heyden,’ Jan van der Heyden (1637-1712), P. Sutton, ed., exhibition catalogue, Greenwich, CT, and Amsterdam, 2006, pp. 90-103).

Though Sillemans’ use of counter-proofs no doubt provided an expedient method by which he could produce paintings, it equally served a higher purpose. His methods challenged contemporary viewers to distinguish between the printed and painted, often going to extraordinary lengths to disguise his technique by going over details or adding elements with the pen and brush. That this was appreciated by some of Holland’s greatest connoisseurs in the period is evident by the fact that among the names of his few known patrons was the distinguished physician, collector and chair at Leiden University, Franciscus de la Boë Sylvius (1614-1672). Sylvius’ collection totalled no fewer than 172 paintings, including eleven works by Gerrit Dou and nine by Frans van Mieris, the two most expensive artists of their day.