Imaginary Inlet in Southern Arctic Waters in Summer, Bonaventura Peeters (I), c. 1640 - c. 1650 – (Bonaventura I Peeters) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Bonaventura I Peeters

Date: 1650

Size: 56 x 142 cm

Technique: Oil On Canvas

This is a seemingly early, painted evocation of the Arctic world, a region which had received great publicity following Gerrit de Veer’s illustrated, 1598 account of the voyage of Willem Barentsz, Jacob Heemskerk and Jan Cornelisz Rijp in 1596, in which Spitsbergen was discovered and Dutchmen overwintered for the first time in the Arctic (on Novaya Zemlya).24 Detailed maps of the area were quickly published by Johannes van Doetecum (c. 1530-1605),25 and there soon followed illustrated descriptions, both in English and Dutch, of other voyages to the region and feats of endurance including the Journael by Jacob van der Brugge of 1634.26 Peeters does not here depict any ice, and the rocky peaks are snowless, so it would appear to be summer in the south of the region. Spitsbergen itself was treeless27 and perhaps because a few trees can be made out in the present work, the 1934 museum catalogue described the locality with qualification as the Norwegian coast. Whaling was vigorously pursued in Spitsbergen in the first half of the seventeenth century, first by several nations and then primarily by the Dutch.28 Cornelis de Bie refers to Peeters’s whaling subjects.29 Extant by him is a whale hunt in a private Norwegian collection.30 Another showing a seemingly realistic whale hunt in which the hunters in rowing boats circle a harpooned whale was with the dealer Julius Weitzner, London, in 1931; its date has been read as 1645.31 A view by him, said to be of Archangel and certainly of a port in northern waters of 1644, in which is prominent a ship flying the Danish flag, is in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.32 The scene in the Rijksmuseum picture, which is signed with Peeters’s initials, is not specific enough to be identifiable, and is only partially generic of what had been published about life in Arctic waters experienced during the whaling season in summer months. A single whale, not a school as would normally have been the case, is shown in the distance.33 It is not being hunted. While Peeters has included the typical huts, or ‘tents’ as they were called,34 none of the technology necessary for exploiting chiefly the whale blubber – furnaces, coppers, coolers and barrels – is depicted as is the case in Cornelis de Man’s painting of 1639 (SK-A-2355).35 Confrontations with ‘white’ bears are a frequent subject of illustration in the pamphlets referred to above.36 The Dutch man-of-war moored offshore would also have been an accepted occurrence, as warships were despatched to the area to protect Dutch whaling operations. The present picture, executed perhaps in the 1640s, and Peeters’s other pictures of northern waters, were something of a novelty for a south Netherlandish artist to have undertaken. Whether he made a journey to the Arctic is debatable and is discussed above in his biography. His idiom seems to have been that of Adam Willaerts (1577-1664, active in Utrecht), though the latter’s coastal scenes were situated in lower latitudes.37 Gregory Martin, 2022