detail from painting below | | 
Paintings of the van de Veldes, Vol II, p.1053Michael Robinson notes that the above picture, 29 x 23, was painted "perhaps only partly by the Younger", and adds that probably "Monamy freely adapted" it for the signed work, detail left, full picture below. Interest in Monamy's "adaptation" centres on the compositional extension, the undulating foreground line and the "selective fall of light". | MORE STORMS 
Christie's, 13/11/1974, lot 57."The shallow waves that rolled under his window" ---- Horace Walpole, 1780
"He is reputed to have excelled in calms" ----- Samuel Redgrave, 1878
"His ocean is invariably the weakest part of his work" ----- Colonel M.H.Grant, 1926
"tameness and lack of vigour" ----- E.Keble Chatterton, 1928
"his work has little variety" ----- Anonymous Copyist, 1970
Another related candidate, below.
Spink 1926. Signed. 20 x 24."It cannot be said that his work ever approached the sublime".
E.H.H.Archibald, Dictionary of Sea Painters, 1980.
Mr Archibald's conception of the "sublime" can only be guessed at. 
another variant. signed. 24 x 26| See Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1757. Part I. - Sect.VII - Of the sublime: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. |
detail from painting below: many precedents
pieter mulier, bonaventura peeters, ludolf bakhuysen, etc, etc
signed monamy. 24¼ x 29¼
click here for the sailor's fate
So far, approximately 30 storm scenes by Monamy have been located.
They seem to me much more interesting than most of his calms. A matter of taste.
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