The Dutch Fleet under Sail

On 27 July 1674 the Amsterdam publisher Pieter Blaeu wrote to Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici in Florence to say that the van de Velde was finished. Blaeu bought pictures for the cardinal in Holland. The asking price had been 400 Dutch florins and he settled it at 325. That December he wrote again to say the painting was on its way south. Leopoldo died in March 1675, and the inventory taken of his rooms on the second floor of the Pitti lists it at number 209, hanging in the chamber they called del satiro, in an ebonised frame made for it that same year by Giuseppe Rossinroti. The picture is a pen painting, black ink drawn onto a canvas prepared in white, each ship worked out rigging by rigging. Among the vessels named in it are the Gouden Leeuw and the Vrijheid, and in the distance De Ruyter's flagship, the Zeven Provinciën.