To readers of Gallery Notes half a century ago and more, the cover illustration of a shipping scene (see illus) would have been familiar, but few may have known the artist or the fact that it was actually painted in black and white. The picture in question, sold by John Mitchell in 1960, was a whaling scene from the early eighteenth century by Adrian Van Salm, the last exponent of the Dutch method of penschilderij. This distinctive technique of drawing with brush and pen on a hard white ground was made famous across Europe by Willem Van de Velde the Elder, and the splendid exhibition at Greenwich last year reminded us how it was so particularly well suited to marine subjects. Even in later years, when he and his family worked in the Queen’s House, there was little falling-off in quality in his ‘pen-paintings’ (see p. 4-5), and one wonders how these unusual pictures were regarded by the English imitators of the Van de Veldes such as Samuel Scott ... download document to read more.