ADAM'S IRISH OLD MASTERS 14 MAY 2026

34 harbour with limpid skies and glassy sea; on land sailors and fishermen go about the business of the day. The other is a perilous stormy scene with ships in heavy weather off a rocky coast. Van der Hagen’s work here sits within a long tradition of pairing scenes of calm and storm which was exploited by William van der Velde (1633-1707) and culminated in the art of Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714-89), though in light of his politically freighted depiction of the royal yacht in the Landing of King William at Carrickfergus, it is just pos- sible that there is also a symbolic resonance, playing with the longstanding metaphor of the ‘ship of state’, shown in balmy or alternatively perilous conditions to represent a well- or ill-governed polity. Equally, there just may be a biographical element at play here. An early nineteenth-century (and not nec- essarily reliable) source states that Van der Hagen’s arrival in Ireland was caused by his determination to witness for the sake of his art – like Turner later – the extremities of a storm at sea, and that it was ‘stress of weather’ which marooned him here. Of the pair, the ‘Calm’ sits firmly within the tradition of ‘Mediterranean harbour’ scenes by Dutch-Italianate artists such as Jan Weenix (1642-1719) and at the same time it is clearly related to a series of Irish capriccio landscapes, by Van der Haven including an important example, formerly in Kilsharvan House, County Meath, which dates from 1736, two years before the present pair (private collection). There are, meanwhile, in- triguing Irish counterparts to his storm scene. Just the