Attributed to Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom

In the summer of 1588 the Spanish Armada sailed against England, and English and Dutch ships fought it in the Channel. This canvas shows a Spanish galleon, known by its flag with the Immaculate Conception, attacked by a Dutch vessel flying the Orange arms, with English ships around them. A guidebook to the Villa Borghese published in 1650 already described it simply as a naval battle by a Flemish painter.

The name came much later. The 1833 inventory gave it to Filippo Lauri, a Roman painter of small figures, and in 1983 the scholar Margarita Russell attributed it to Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom by comparing it with his other sea battles. The museum's attributed to records her case, which rests on style.

Vroom, from Haarlem, is counted among the founders of Dutch marine painting, and he had travelled in Italy as a young man. After the Armada he designed a set of tapestries of the campaign for Lord Howard of Effingham, the English admiral who commanded against it. They later hung in the House of Lords and were destroyed when the Palace of Westminster burned in 1834.