My (humble) ART Collection (Selected)
Reinier Nooms was a highly respected painter, draftsman, and internationally renowned graphic artist who specialized in maritime subjects during a period when the Dutch commercial empire spanned the globe. He was born in either 1623 or 1624, presumably in Amsterdam, to parents whose names are unknown.[1] Nooms probably received his artistic training in Amsterdam, but we do not know the name of his teacher. His earliest known work is a drawing dated 1643 made at the age of 19 or 20 that depicts the rear of Amsterdam’s Old City Hall (Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg).[2]
Nooms’s artistic speciality and the fact that he signed his paintings R. Zeeman or Reinier Zeeman (zeeman = sailor or seaman) make it virtually certain that he was both a professional sailor and an artist. Nooms drew on his intimate knowledge of ships to create images that are so accurate that settings, specific vessels, and the activities taking place in ports and aboard ships can be exactly identified.
Nooms was greatly influenced by the work of Claude Lorrain. In turn, Nooms remarkably inspired the gifted graphic artist, Charles Meryon. The young Meryon copied several of Noom's marine etchings.
In 1918, William Aspenwall Bradley noted that “Nooms’s etchings are widely acclaimed, as they have ‘a truth of observation and rendering, coupled with a charm and purity of linear style that puts him in the very front rank of craftsmen on copper.’” William Aspenwall Bradley, Dutch Landscape Etchers of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 1918).