KOEKKOEK; JOHANNES HERMANUS
1778 Veere - 1851 Amsterdam

Shipwreck off the Zeeland Coast.
Ca. 1815.
Oil on wood.
41;5 x 55;5cm.
Notation: Signed lower left: J.H. Koekkoek ?Middelburgh.
Frame/Pedestal: Framed.
Literature:
A. Nollert and G. de Werd: Barend Cornelis Koekkoek (1803-1862); seine Familie; seine Schule und das Haus Koekkoek in Kleve; Kleve 2000; p. 39ff.; ill. no. 38; p. 40.

Provenance:
Private collection; Europe.

Dramatic scenes take place on the beach: a large sailboat has sunk off the coast; only the masts protrude diagonally from the surging water. A boat with sailors has already reached the beach; another one is still struggling against the rough sea. People rush to help. Two of the shipwrecked people in the middle of the painting show that they literally got away with their bare lives.
The viewer's gaze falls through the dune landscape onto the small-figured scene. The grey; partly black clouds in the sky threaten to cloud over. The storm is not over yet. In the left half of the painting; the high pillar of a church ruin rises to the sky and offers shelter to three people. In the right half of the painting an almost white glowing dune forms the brightest part of the painting and merges into the white spray of the sea.
Johannes Hermanus Koekkoek; who created this painting; was a Dutch naval painter who often depicted the inferiority of man to the superiority of the elements of nature. He is the ancestor of the famous Koekkoek family of painters; and it is astonishing; given the high painterly quality of his work; that he probably achieved this mastery almost autodidactically; from the beginnings of an apprenticeship as a painter to a position in a wallpaper factory and evening courses at the Middelburg drawing academy.
Thanks to his immense talent; he was able to set up his own business as a painter around 1806 and must also have been an excellent teacher; as all of his four sons became painters and his probably most famous son Barend Cornelis proudly reported that his father was his only teacher. The painting offered here is from Koekkoek's early period in Middelburg; before he left the Zeeland capital in 1826 and moved to Amsterdam.
Shipwrecks were depicted in the Netherlands; which was characterized by seafaring; but the question arises whether shipwrecks in this period were also understood as a metaphor for the stormy times that the Dutch people had to endure during the occupation and annexation by Napoleonic France.

We are grateful to Guido de Werd; Cologne; who confirmed the attribution in the original.