ABSTRACT
The combination of painting and national consciousness is a topic that has attracted considerable attention in Dutch art historical research in the late twentieth century, but which has not received much scholarly follow-up since then. In these studies, the genre of marine painting was overlooked or marginalised. Consequently, the extent to which this genre in the Netherlands was related to the cultivation of a national sentiment was not examined at that time. In the nineteenth century, there was a strong identification of the Dutch nation with ships and the sea, an image that referred to the maritime past and its close relationship with water. This was partly fuelled by a patriotic interest in maritime heritage. Marine painting cannot be separated from this.
