In this pen painting, Experiens Sillemans has taken a view looking from the south across the River Ij at Amsterdam.  A stiff breeze is blowing, whipping up the foreground water and forming whitecaps on the crests of the waves.  A pleasure yacht, moored to some wooden pilings, occupies the left foreground, while a rowing boat appears on the right.  A fluit (fluitschepen) – a large ocean-going trading ship - under sail moves off to the right, while further off, various  vessels are manoeuvring in the narrow channel of water. Just visible in the centre background are the ghostly outlines of the gallows-field on the spit of land on the north side of the River Ij, known as The Volewijck, where public executions were carried out. This small motif alone would have been sufficient for contemporaries to recognise the location. 

With Willem van de Velde the Elder (1611-1693), Experiens Sillemans was among the earliest of Dutch artists to specialise in the production of paintings in pen and ink on prepared supports known as penschilderijen. This remarkable fusion of painting and drawing found continued resonance among subsequent generations of artists, including both Ludolf Bakhuizen (1631-1708) and Adriaen Cornelisz. van Salm (c. 1657-1720), the latter of whom continued the tradition into the early decades of the eighteenth century. The son of an English immigrant to Amsterdam, Sillemans was generally described in contemporary documents as an ‘engraver’, though in 1642 one identifies his occupation as ‘engraver and draughtsman’. He chiefly provided book illustrations, including, for example, three excellent images for the 1642 edition of Jacob Cats’ Houwelyck. A remarkable pair of documents dated 16 and 19 April of that year describe how a few days earlier a cannon was fired from the ship De Pelgrim as it came upon the Montelbaanstoren, seriously damaging Sillemans’s house and ‘shop’ and nearly taking him out as well. Perhaps on account of his geographic proximity to these ships, by the late 1640s Sillemans had begun to produce penschilderijen of marine subjects, the earliest dated example of which is his Ships in a Harbour, dated 1649[i].

Owing to his short period of activity producing such works, Sillemans’s pen paintings are extremely rare. Perhaps only around twenty or so such works are extant, roughly half of which bear dates between 1649 and 1652, and the vast majority of which are today in public collections. The present painting appears to have been one of a pair of works – now separated - that are the only known paintings by Sillemans on copper (they remained together until at least the middle of the twentieth century) and are quite possibly the only penschilderijen by any artist executed on this support. 

In a 1984 article for Print Quarterly, David Freedberg, Aviva Burnstock and Alan Phenix identified the remarkable method by which Sillemans developed many of his penschilderijen. Following technical examination of two Sillemans panels, the authors described the artist’s working method as follows:

“[H]e used a method of counter-proofing to produce at least some of the elements within his pictures; that the surface, thus printed – and not drawn or painted – was then added to or gone over in pen and ink, as well as with the brush (particularly in the washed areas); and that instead of printing from an impression of a single plate, he must have used separate pieces of printed paper (either cut up from a single impression or made from small pieces of etched copper plates) to print individual figures, ships and boats in different positions”.[ii]

Evidence of this process in the present painting can be found in another pair of works on panel, which largely depict the same compositions as those in the present painting and its former pendant, the first of which is today in the collection of the Amsterdam Museum[iii] while the second was formerly on the Rotterdam art market[iv]. The painting in Amsterdam is nearly identical in composition, except for the addition of a vessel in the central middle ground in lieu of the gallows that appear in both the present painting and the one whose location is unknown today. These details were likely added by hand with pen and ink, while the larger ships at left and right would have been made through the counter-proofing process outlined above. The painting in Amsterdam was acquired in 1981, together with another of identical size depicting men collecting and loading salt, perhaps on the Cape Verde Islands off the western coast of Africa, which is presumed to be its pendant[v]. That painting is known in a further version in the collection of Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam[vi]. Sillemans appears to have produced such pendants on several further occasions, including this painting and its former companion piece, both of which appeared together in the 1951 sale in Dordrecht. 

Though Sillemans’s use of counter-proofs no doubt provided an expedient method by which he could produce paintings, it equally served a higher purpose. His methods challenged contemporary viewers to distinguish between the printed and painted, often going to extraordinary lengths to disguise his technique by going over details or adding elements with the pen and brush. That this was appreciated by some of Holland’s greatest connoisseurs of the day is evidenced by the fact that among the names of his few known patrons was the distinguished physician, collector and chair at Leiden University, Franciscus de la Boë Sylvius (1614-1672), whose estate contained no less than seven works by Sillemans, as well as works by such renowned painters as Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris.

BIOGRAPHY

Very little is known about the life of Experiens Sillemans.  The son of Geoffry Sillemans (? – 1646), an English immigrant who registered as a portman of Amsterdam in 1610, he was born in Amsterdam around 1613.  On 27 September 1633, he married the 18-year-old Anna Wijld of Yarmouth in a ceremony in the town hall.  The couple had three children, Jacobus, Maria and Rebecca.  Following the death of his first wife, Sillemans married Evertje Teunis on 25 June 1650, in the Reformed Church. Their first child, Annetje, was christened in the Oude Kerk on 11 October 1650.  The marriage was short-lived, however, as Sillemans died, in reduced circumstances, in 1653.  On 8 April 1653, the three children from his first marriage were admitted to the civic orphanage, where they arrived ‘penniless’[vii].