Turmoil and Tranquillity: The sea through the eyes of Dutch and Flemish Masters, 1550-1700
National Maritime Museum, London

Pitched into the waves by his terrified companions, the prophet Jonah cannot escape the jaws of the predatory whale below. He looks tiny and helpless, but the painter Adam Willaerts does not allow us to focus on Jonah’s predicament for long. Most of this oval painting is dominated by the mighty turbulence afflicting sky and sea and alike.

London-born Willaerts, who spent most of his adult life in Utrecht in the Netherlands, offers a depiction of the storm and its unnerving impact on five ships. They all appear fated to break up and sink forthwith. Nothing, not even the sacrificial gesture of hurling Jonah to his doom, seems capable of rescuing the vessels or their frantically gesturing crews.

Here, in the second decade of the 17th century, the seascape attains its formidable maturity as a prominent new genre in western art. Willaerts’s remorseless painting is one of the first exhibits we encounter in Turmoil and Tranquillity, a celebration of the National Maritime Museum’s collection of sea paintings from the Netherlands. Displayed in the Queen’s House, where Willem van de Velde and his son both painted naval pictures for Charles II on an annual salary of £100 each, it adds up to a rousing experience. By this time, the Dutch republic had become such a far-reaching maritime power that it fuelled the growth of artists who specialised in the sea’s immensity at its most overwhelming.

Willaerts’ enterprising son Abraham seized every opportunity to travel beyond Europe. He accompanied a pioneering expedition to Brazil in 1637, and was sent on to Angola with the Dutch fleet. But that did not curtail his fantasy in maritime paintings. Although his 1669 painting is entitled “A Spanish Three-Decker at Anchor off Naples”, (pictured left) the harbour is imaginary. Dominated by a tall and highly elaborate lighthouse, it shows in the foreground a sword-carrying European traveller conversing with a Turkish or Ottoman official, who wears a white turban and clutches a scimitar. The gesture looks defensive, yet the overall mood of this detailed canvas is peaceful enough. It reflects the Dutch Republic’s willingness to trade with Ottomans in the Mediterranean, and was purchased from Willaerts by a Utrecht-based merchant with an appetite for souvenirs of far-reaching expeditions.

A willingness to travel with Dutch adventurers nearly cost one notable artist his life. After extensive roamings in the Mediterranean when young, the aptly named Hendrick Vroom later set sail for Spain in the hope of selling his religious paintings. But his ship was overwhelmed by bad weather near the Portuguese coast, and after Vroom jumped into a boat with fellow crew-members he reached the safety of a rocky inlet. Even there he might have frozen to death. By a miracle, however, the stricken ship and its cargo of paintings were finally washed ashore. After inspecting the pictures, local monks decided that the castaways must be faithful believers and rescued them. The grateful Vroom stayed in Lisbon for a time, painting sea storms inspired by his own traumatic experience of a shipwreck.

But his exhibits in the Greenwich show are tepid, and overshadowed by a large, dramatic painting executed in 1615 by his eldest son Cornelis Vroom. No tempest can be detected here. Instead, Spanish men-of-war are seen battling with North African corsairs. The enemy, known by dismissive Europeans as “Barbary pirates”, are shown in galleys. And much of the foreground is alive with the half-clad figures of a crew in turmoil, struggling to escape drowning as the Spanish guns fire at their sinking vessel. Vroom’s handling of these desperate men is reminiscent of the imperilled, starving castaways painted by Géricault 200 years later in “The Raft of the Medusa”. Fascinatingly, Vroom’s sympathy for the crew may have stemmed from his awareness that they were, in fact, Christian slaves. Maybe as a further manifestation of his compassionate feelings, he wrote “C. Vroom 1615” on the mast of their doomed ship.

This is the earliest known painting by an artist highly esteemed by his contemporaries. It goes a long way towards explaining such admiration, and typifies the excellence of the National Maritime Museum’s collection. Many canvases have been rescued from the obscurity of storage specially for this exhibition and one in particular is now transformed by ambitious conservation. Abraham Storck, renowned in Amsterdam as a master of “tempestuous and tranquil seascapes”, painted a panoramic canvas around 1690 of a ceremonial event on the river IJ near his native city. Cleverly shaped to fit over an arched doorway, it was later acquired by Turner who relied on the painting when planning his renowned “Admiral van Tromp’s Barge at the Entrance of the Texel”.

Subsequently, though, the unusual curved hollow at the base of Storck’s canvas was filled in. To make matters worse, the same ill-advised restorer added a mediocre strip of clouds to the sky. These disastrous additions ruined the subtly orchestrated liveliness of the original painting, but they have now been removed with exemplary care.

On the whole, however, the placidity of such exhibits is outgunned at every turn by images of tempest, panic and devastation. Jan Porcellis, nicknamed “the Raphael of sea-painting”, unleashes the rage of a gale on some hapless Dutch ships. The mainsail on the most prominent vessel has broken loose in the storm and hurtled towards the waves. Historians speculate that Porcellis may have intended his painting as an allegory of faith, dramatising God’s ability to raise the wind and, by the same token, to calm the ocean’s fury.

But we are more likely to admire his wildness of paint-handling, most unexpectedly in an audacious little panel called “English Ships in a Rough Sea”. Executed as early as 1606-10, it summarises the furious waves in a semi-abstract flurry of uninhibited brush-marks. Porcellis enlivens the urgency of his scene even more by including a sea monster on the left, spurting water as it shoots ferociously towards an imperilled vessel. Far from rivalling Raphael, he looks forward here to the freedom of modern art at its most exhilarating.

‘Turmoil and Tranquillity’ is in The Queen’s House at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich: tel +44 (0) 20 8312 6790  Until January 11 2009, admission free