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Willem van de Velde the Elder
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Early Days:
Willem van de Velde, known as the Elder, a marine draughtsman and painter, was the son of a Flemish skipper, Willem Willemszon van de Velde, and is commonly said to have been bred to the sea. In 1706 Bainbrigg Buckeridge noted that he “understood navigation very well”. He married Judith Adriaensdochter van Leeuwen in Leiden, the Netherlands, in 1631.
His three known legitimate children were named Magdalena, born 1632; Willem, known as the Younger, also a marine painter, born 1633; and Adriaen, a landscape painter, born 1636.
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Career:
He was the official artist of the Dutch fleet for a period, being present at the Four Days Battle, 1-4 June 1666, and the St James's Day Battle, 25 July 1666, to make sketches. In his work on the biographies of artists, Arnold Houbraken quotes Gerard Brandt's biography of Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, relating the anecdote where Willem van de Velde asked Admiral de Ruyter permission to have a galley row him around for a good view of the proceedings on the evening of the Four Days battle in 1666. He wasn't the only artist to paint the scenes of this battle, his son, Ludolf Bakhuysen and Pieter Cornelisz van Soest also made paintings of it.
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