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An English ship rolls her crew into the sea under a red ensign. Storck put the arithmetic of the battle where the buyer could count it.

The English began the battle a fleet short, having split their forces on faulty intelligence: Prince Rupert had been sent west to intercept a French squadron that never came, and George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, met the Dutch off the North Foreland on 1 June 1666 with 56 ships against Michiel de Ruyter's 84. Monck, a soldier who treated the sea as a battlefield that happened to be wet, attacked anyway. What followed had never happened before and has never happened since: a fleet action that ran four consecutive days, drifting between the English coast and the Flemish shoals, the two fleets grinding, separating at nightfall, finding each other again at dawn like a quarrel resumed at breakfast. By the second day the English were fighting a retreat; on the third, Rupert's returning squadron appeared and evened the arithmetic; and on the same evening England's pride ran physically aground. The Royal Prince, 90 guns, the grandest ship afloat and a veteran of half a century of state occasions, stuck fast on the Galloper Sand. Surrounded by Dutch fireships with no way to answer her helm, her crew's nerve went, and Admiral Sir George Ayscue struck his flag: the highest-ranking English naval officer ever captured at sea, a record that stands. De Ruyter, unable to float his prize off the sand, burned her where she sat, and Storck's painting keeps her final service: a bonfire by which two fleets fought on. The fourth day settled it. De Ruyter broke the exhausted English line, and Monck took the survivors home through the shoals. The butcher's totals were lopsided in every column: around ten English ships lost against four Dutch, some four and a half thousand English casualties, 2,000 of them prisoners, against 1,500. London, which had rung bells for a rumored victory on the first reports, went quiet as the truth docked. Yet the strangest fact of the Four Days' Battle is what it failed to decide. Eight weeks later the rebuilt English fleet beat De Ruyter soundly on St James's Day, and the war rolled on toward its actual conclusion: the plague year, the burned city, a treasury too empty to send the fleet out, and De Ruyter's masts coming up the Medway. Storck painted the battle repeatedly for a Dutch market that could not get enough of it, and this version keeps his habits: the sea opened like a stage, the flagships correct to their pennants, and in the left foreground a broken English ship rolling her people into the water, close enough that the buyers, hanging it in an Amsterdam parlor, could count them.