The Van de Veldes, father and son, worked as a team for much of their lives, with the father’s drawings and ship portraits serving as a basis for the son’s paintings. The latter always interpreted his father’s studies very freely, and there is no known drawing which was copied literally in a painting. Although Arnold Houbraken states that the elder Van de Velde also took up the brush in later years, no convincing evidence has ever been found to support this. What he did do was work up his own studies into pen paintings, a technique that will be discussed below.

Van de Velde’s drawings and pen paintings of historic maritime events are based either on eye-witness accounts or on his own first-hand experience, for he took to observing sea battles from his own galliot or from a vessel lent to him by the government. In this way he could follow the manoeuvres and individual actions as they developed, and record them in drawings made on the spot. It was clearly a risky way of working, and definitely not for the faint-hearted, but it suited his restless, adventurous spirit. His own graphic description of the Battle of Scheveningen (Ter Heide) of 1653 was that the sight of the English and Dutch fleets pounding each other was like ‘looking into a fiery furnace’ (‘of men in een gloeyenden oven sagh’).