Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen

On 25 April 1607 a Dutch fleet sailed into the Bay of Gibraltar and attacked the Spanish ships anchored there. It was the first time the Dutch had carried their sea war with Spain that far from home, and they won. About 14 years later the Admiralty of Amsterdam commissioned a large painting of the battle from the Haarlem painter Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen. His canvas in the Rijksmuseum, probably the trial piece he painted before he got that commission, shows the Spanish flagship, struck by a smaller Dutch warship, blowing apart in the middle of the bay, with soldiers hurled into the air.

Ships and sea battles were his speciality. He was the son of a Haarlem captain, a friend of the painters Hendrick Goltzius and Cornelis van Haarlem, and he held posts in the city's painters' guild. The town councils of Haarlem and Amsterdam were among his clients.

His best-loved picture told a Haarlem legend from the Crusades, in which a ship from the town breaks the chain barring the harbour of Damietta in Egypt. In 1629 the town commissioned him to design a tapestry of that scene for the council chamber of its town hall. It is more than 10 metres long, and it still belongs to Haarlem City Hall.