Portrait of Engel de Ruyter (1649-1683)

Engel de Ruyter was 20 when Ferdinand Bol painted him in 1669, and he had already been going to sea for five years. He first sailed as a boy on his father's ships, served as a midshipman in the war against England in 1666, and in the year of this portrait became a captain with a permanent post in the navy. Bol gives him the bearing of a ruler, well beyond his age. His father, Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, had sat to Bol two years earlier, and the two portraits now hang in the same room of the Mauritshuis. Engel was wounded by a splinter at the battle of Solebay in 1672 and rose to vice-admiral in 1678. He died in 1683, aged 33, and a portrait recorded in his Amsterdam house that year was probably this one.