Portrait of an navigator by a table with a celestial globe, a cross staff, an astrolabe, a pair of dividers and charts, a frigate firing a salute beyond

A preliminary study for Verkolje's picture, sold Christie's London, 9 December 1994, lot 283, R. Baldwin, Globes as symbols of political and navigational authority, The Map Collector, Winter 1992, no. 61, p. 4, illustrated p. 3. As Baldwin pointed out, circumnavigators and senior naval officers often had globes included in their portraits to mark the importance of their achievements. Dutch portraitists of the 17th Century tended to show such men alongside celestial globes owing to the recording and navigational exploitation of the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere. A comparable drawing by Verkolje was in the Klaver Collection, M. Schapelhouman, P. Schatborn, Tekeningen van oude meesters, de verzameling Jacobus A. Klaver, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam Zwolle, 1993, pp. 184-5, no. 86, illustrated. The navigator in the picture from this drawing is depicted standing next to a celestial globe similar to the 1682 Van Keulen versions of earlier Blaeu globes, which may allow a dating of both the drawing and picture to after 1682. Seen through the doorway are two surveyors using a pedometer beneath guns that are firing a salute.