"It is not easy to understand," perhaps, but two helps towards understanding may be mentioned in Ruskin's own words. First, previous painters--including even the Venetians, sea-folk though they were--had all treated the sea conventionally. Vandevelde and his fellows, at any rate, endeavoured to study it from nature. Bakhuizen, as we shall see, like Turner after him, used to go to sea in all weathers, the better to obtain "impressions." Hence the Dutch sea-painting did mark an advance, and how great was its influence on later artists and sea-lovers we know from the case of Turner, who "painted many pictures in the manner of Vandevelde, and always painted the sea too grey, and too opaque, in consequence of his early study of him." And this grey and opaque rendering of the sea by the Dutch was to some extent due to natural causes. "Although in artistical qualities lower than is easily by language expressible, the Italian marine painting usually conveys an idea of three facts about the sea,--that it is green, that it is deep, and that the sun shines on it. The dark plain which stands for far-away Adriatic with the Venetians, and the glinting swells of tamed wave which lap about the quays of Claude, agree in giving the general impression that the ocean consists of pure water, and is open to the pure sky. But the Dutch painters, while they attained considerably greater dexterity than the Italian in mere delineation of nautical incident, were by nature precluded from ever becoming aware of these common facts; and having, in reality, never in all their lives seen the sea, but only a shallow mixture of sea-water and sand; and also never in all their lives seen the sky, but only a lower element between them and it, composed of marsh exhalation and fog-bank,--they are not to be with too great severity reproached for the dulness of their records of the nautical enterprise of Holland. _We_ only are to be reproached, who, familiar with the Atlantic, are yet ready to accept with faith, as types of sea, the small waves _en papillote_ and peruke-like puffs of farinaceous foam, which were the delight of Bakhuizen and his compeers"[97] (_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. v. ch. i. § 20; vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. xviii. § 30; _On the Old Road_, i. 283; _Harbours of England_, p. 18). The storms of Van der Velde are certainly unattractive, but the silvery daylight of his "calms at sea" gives to many of his works an enduring charm. This painter is well represented both in the Dulwich Gallery and in the Wallace collection. 150. A GALE AT SEA. _Willem van de Velde_ (Dutch: 1633-1707). _See_ 149. 151. A RIVER SCENE. _Jan van Goyen_ (Dutch: 1596-1656). _See_ 137. Signed with the artist's name, and dated 1645.