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Tromp's Gouden Leeuw takes the center under full colors. Somewhere across the smoke is Spragge, keeping the third and last of their appointments.

For 30 years the Dutch fleet sailed with its own embedded artists: Willem van de Velde and his son, also Willem, who followed the battles in a small galliot, close enough to smell the powder, the father sketching ship by ship while the shot went overhead. Admirals altered course around them; the States paid for the service; and the resulting drawings were the seventeenth century's war photography, accurate to the last flag. Then came 1672, the year the Dutch still call the Year of Disaster, when France and England attacked together and the art market died with the economy. The van de Veldes considered their position through one hungry winter and solved it professionally: they moved to London and went to work for Charles II, at a hundred pounds a year each, painting for the fleet they had spent their lives painting against. Which is how the greatest picture of the Dutch navy's finest day came to be painted in Greenwich, for English customers, 14 years after the fact. On 21 August 1673 off Texel, De Ruyter, outnumbered as always, fought the combined Anglo-French fleet to a standstill and ended the war: the French squadron kept its distance, the English took the damage, and within months England signed a separate peace. The canvas follows the Gouden Leeuw, flagship of Cornelis Tromp, who spent the day locked in a private duel with his personal rival Sir Edward Spragge, the third time the two had sought each other out in three battles. Spragge did not survive the appointment; shifting to his third flagship of the day, his boat took a shot and he drowned in the North Sea with the battle still running. The son painted it all with the family's trademark: not glory but inventory. Every ship is identifiable; the rigging damage is plausible; the drowning men in the right foreground are neither hidden nor dramatized, just present, the way they were present in the sketchbooks. English collectors bought Dutch victories from Dutch painters and hung them without embarrassment, because the van de Veldes had made accuracy itself the product, and accuracy had no nationality. Father and son stayed in England for good, ran a studio in the Queen's House at Greenwich, and trained or influenced every English marine painter for a century; when Turner wanted to measure himself, it was a van de Velde he asked to be hung beside. The two men who had followed De Ruyter under fire died English residents, employees of the crown their sketches had once helped to fight.