• Peter Monamy and the Legacy of the Van de Veldes

  • An excellent exhibition of the work of the van de Veldes is currently on display at the Queen’s House, Greenwich, highlighting the importance of the Dutch father and son who established interest in the genre of maritime painting in England. In response to this exhibition, this article continues the narrative in an exploration of one of the first and finest English maritime artists, Peter Monamy (1681-1749), who was inspired by the van de Veldes and other European painters but also developed a style of his own. This article offers an introduction to the artist through works currently for sale at Rountree Tryon Galleries, the full details of which can be found by following this link to the artist’s page.

     

    Monamy was born in London and was apprenticed as a teenager to a former Master of the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers, William Clark, and he likely succeeded to Clark’s practice upon his death in 1704. After this, he worked as both a decorator and easel painter and is recorded as an established studio painter based in Westminster by the early 1720s. Willem van de Velde the Younger died in 1707, leaving it to a new generation of artists to keep up the momentum in maritime painting in England which the Dutch masters had begun in 1672/3. Certainly, as David Joel wrote in his monograph on Charles Brooking, ‘the van de Veldes provided the benchmark to which many marine artists aspired’.

  • Monamy built a reputation as a highly capable and technically skilled painter of both commercial, ‘cabinet-sized’, calms and battle scenes...
    Monamy built a reputation as a highly capable and technically skilled painter of both commercial, ‘cabinet-sized’, calms and battle scenes and was working at his peak from around 1730 to 1745. It was during a period of relative peace between The War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) and The War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-1748) that Monamy painted many attractive calms, warships, and Royal events. An example of one of his typically appealing and moderately sized calms is A Naval Squadron of the Red about to leave the anchorage in a calm. The artist shows the influence of the van de Veldes in his use of what Joel terms the ‘visual step’ device – the dark lower edge of the composition which adds depth and leads the eye of the viewer into the scene. Nonetheless, for F.B. Cockett, who published a monograph on Monamy and his circle, Monamy ‘developed a style which was technically very advanced, but was also brighter, more colourful and somehow more decorative and immediately attractive than the routine output of the van de Velde studio’. This mastery of both palette and atmosphere is demonstrated here in the vibrant combination of blue and gold as well as the subtle gradations of colour in the sea and sky.
  • In addition to this expert use of light and colour, Monamy made numerous trips to observe vessels at sea and at anchor and is considered one of the most accurate painters of ships. His career coincided with a period of rapid growth in British naval power and he responded quickly to significant seafaring events while also painting famous naval actions of recent history. Such a painting is The Destruction of the Soleil Royal at the Battle of La Hogue, 23 May, 1692, the events of the scene having taken place when the artist was a boy. The French Soleil Royal was one of the most beautiful and elaborate baroque flagships ever built. She was attacked by seventeen English ships while beached for repairs on the pointe du Hommet, Cherbourg amidst the Battles of Barlfeur and La Hogue, part of The Nine Years' War (1688-1697) – a conflict between France and the Grand Alliance, considered by some to be the first ever world war. The stern of the Soleil Royal was set alight by a fireship which then ignited the powder rooms, allegedly leaving only one survivor among the crew. A smaller painting of the scene by Monamy is in the collection of Royal Museums Greenwich.
  • As a successful and in-demand artist, Monamy likely ran a studio with young artists that assisted him in his output...
    As a successful and in-demand artist, Monamy likely ran a studio with young artists that assisted him in his output – artists who would themselves go on to form the second generation of English maritime painters. As Cockett states, ‘It seems more than likely that he had skilled assistants working with him from time to time. It is not unlikely that the young Brooking may have spent a little time in this way. It is even more likely that artists such as Francis Swaine, T. Leemans and Thomas Allen may have worked with him in this capacity’. A painting currently for sale at Rountree Tryon attributed to the studio of Monamy, titled A salute offshore in a calm, may well incorporate early work by the hand of one of these painters.
  • Paintings by the hand of Monamy himself contain clues which are unique to the artist. He was prolific, did not...

    Paintings by the hand of Monamy himself contain clues which are unique to the artist. He was prolific, did not consistently sign his works, and a place to formally exhibit his work (providing us with documentation and catalogues) did not yet exist – the Royal Academy, for example, wasn’t founded until 1768. Therefore, identification of Monamy’s work typically requires an analysis of these stylistic indicators. Cockett describes the primary clues to be faultless perspective and draughtsmanship of ships, truly realistic depictions of the sea, idiosyncratic pennants which droop at an angle of 45 degrees or more in his calms, small boats and two or three figures in the foregrounds, and finally what he terms the ‘Monamy edge’. He describes this as:


    ‘by far the most individual feature of his pictures, particularly in his middle and late periods […]. Nearly always somewhere in the picture will be the billowing white cloud, with a rather sharply defined edge pushed out in a series of curved excrescences with often a well-defined impasto on the margin. […] It looks just as though he achieved this effect not with a brush, but with a finger coated in white paint pushed over the surface of the canvas on the edge of the clouds’.


    These defined edges are particularly evident in both the gun smoke and clouds in a recent acquisition by the gallery, A salute offshore in a calm.

  • Living by his art, Monamy died aged 68 in 1749 after a period of slow financial decline. In Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England, based upon the notebooks of George Vertue, Monamy is described as a home-grown talent who is deeply connected to his maritime subject: ‘The shallow waves that rolled under his window taught young Monamy what his master could not teach him, and fitted him to imitate the turbulence of the ocean’. In this, we see the beginnings of the Romantic view of the connection between the artist and the sea. While not the sole painter of maritime scenes in England at the end of the van de Velde period, Monamy is widely considered the country’s most capable and influential early specialist in the genre. A member of this first generation of English maritime artists, he both continued the legacy of the van de Veldes and innovated a new style within it which paved the way for his successors.

     

    By Lydia Gascoigne, Gallery Specialist

  • Bibliography

    F.B. Cockett, Peter Monamy: 1681-1749 and his circle (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2000)
    David Joel, Charles Brooking, 1723-1759 and the 18th Century British Marine Painters (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2000)
    Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, 4 vol. (London: Strawberry Hill, 1762–71)