The Battle of Terheide, 10 August 1653: an episode from the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652-54)

Willem van de Velde was there. On 10 August 1653 he followed the battle off Terheide, on the coast near Scheveningen, from a small vessel of his own, and beside his signature he wrote 't gajoot van Velde, van de Velde's galliot. It was the last great battle of the First Anglo-Dutch War. The Dutch lost, and their commander, Admiral Maarten Tromp, was killed. His family then commissioned from the artist a series of pen paintings of the admiral's best-known battles, and this one is signed and dated 1657. A pen painting is a drawing made on the scale of a painting. The canvas was primed in a pale tone, and every hull, sail and wave was then drawn with a pen in ink, so the whole thing looks like an engraving almost three metres wide. He used the sketches he had made on board that day as studies for it.