page_title: Jan van de Cappelle
section_title: Works
hierarchical_section_title: Jan van de Cappelle / Works
context_page_description: Jan van de Cappelle was a Dutch Golden Age painter of seascapes and winter landscapes, also notable as an industrialist and art collector. He is "now considered the outstanding marine painter of 17th century Holland". He lived all his life in Amsterdam, and as well as working as an artist spent much, or most, of his time helping to manage his father Franchoy's large dyeworks, which specialized in the expensive dye carmine, and which he eventually inherited in 1674. Presumably because of this dual career, there are fewer than 150 surviving paintings, a relatively small number for the industrious painters of the Dutch Golden Age. His marine paintings usually show estuary or river scenes rather than the open sea, and the water is always very calm, allowing it to act as a mirror reflecting the cloud formations above; this effect was Cappelle's speciality.
context_section_description: The majority of his works are marine or river views, nearly always with several vessels, but he also left a number of small winter landscapes somewhat in the manner of Aert van der Neer; these all seem to date between 1652 and 1654.  His seascapes (using the term loosely) may be large or small; the nine examples in the National Gallery, London, the largest group in a single collection, vary between 122 x 154.5 cm (NG 967: 48 x 61 inches) and 34.8 x 48.1 cm (NG 865: 14 x 19 inches).
  He had no interest in rough seas or cloudless skies, showing large cloudy skies, with the horizon low, about 15-20% of the way up the vertical axis.  The clouds are often mirrored in the dead calm water, although light ripples may be shown.  As is often the case in Dutch seascapes, there is often a warship or "statenjacht" ("States yacht"), an official yacht used for transport, official salutes and other business.  The edge of the composition often slices through vessels, leaving them half seen.  Van de Cappelle painted many parade marine subjects, depicting "a formal gathering of ships for a ceremonial occasion".   Other paintings, mostly smaller and of less busy subjects, a type often called "calms", show "an all-pervading luminous atmosphere that softens all outlines and unifies forms and local colours", or as Kenneth Clark puts it, "When sky was reflected on water, there was achieved that unity of luminous atmosphere which is ... the whole point of van de Capelle and van de Velde".  In his early works he followed the muted palette of the "tonal school", but enlived with local highlights of bright colour, but moved in his later works to "a warmer golden tonality, exceptionally allowing himself a greater colouristic exuberance when setting the rosy glow of a sunset sky against water of a deep turquoise blue, as in the River Scene with Sailing Vessels (Rotterdam, Boymans–van Beuningen Museum)".  According to his leading scholar, Margarita Russell, "More than any other artist of his time, with the exception only of Rembrandt, van de Cappelle was a painter of light".
  Cappelle made a small number of etchings; only two signed ones of landscapes are now firmly attributed to him.  Fewer than twenty of the nearly 750 of his own drawings in the 1680 inventory have survived identifiably.
caption: A Calm, 1650–1655
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