1984 Articles

Paintings or Prints? Experiens Sillemans and the Origins of the "Grisaille" Sea-Piece: Notes on a Rediscovered Technique

Freedberg, David A.; Burnstock, Aviva; Phenix, Alan

Everyone is familiar with the monochromatic paintings of ship or sea-battles that became popular in the Netherlands in the second half of the seventeenth century. They are not, however, the kind of objects one would normally have felt justified in bringing to the attention of readers of Print Quarterly, were it not for the fact that the rediscovery of the technique described in the following pages has important implications for the thitherto unsuspected use of printmaking techniques - to say nothing of the new light that can now be cast on the development of a major genre in seventeenth-century painting. Nowhere do the techniques of drawing, painting, and printmaking seem so close and more difficult to distinguish than in the objects that form the centre of our discussion, to such an extent that, with a very few exceptions, the distinctions have remained united, undescribed and unclassified.