Four Sailing Ships on Choppy Seas

Robert Willemsz de Baudous

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This large unpublished engraving seems to depict a British Royal naval vessel accompanying three ships from the Guinea Company on an expedition in Africa. The Guinea Company was a private company founded to trade in Africa for profit. The flag with a cross and a checkered border is associated with this company. The company, active through the seventeenth century, was involved in the trade of gold, redwood as well as enslaved people. The print was quite likely engraved by Robert de Baudous a Dutch printmaker who created a number of prints of ships in the early 1600s. The publisher Hendrick Hondius I, whose initials "Hh" are inscribed on the sale of the large ship in the center, resided in the port city of Amsterdam in 1603 and during that period he produced a number of prints relating to ships, clearly responding to the marine-interested clientele of the city.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art