Ludolf Bakhuizen, 'A Beach Scene with Fishermen', about 1665

A small fishing boat tosses on a choppy sea close to the shore, its prow lifted, its crew energetically poling their vessel away from the clinging shingle. High puffy clouds soar and spiral in a bright sky, the surf below running fast on to the beach and ebbing to leave wet sand behind.

One of the crew leans down over the stern of the boat to do a last-minute bit of business with two men almost up to their hips in the water. The white of a smock and the lowered sail catch the sunlight – and the attention of a tall young man strolling on the beach. In his smart clothes, with his stick in his hand, his coat on his arm and blowing in the breeze, he looks a little out of place beside the windswept fishermen.

Perhaps the young man waits for the woman clutching her enormous hat as she bargains with someone in the group on the left. Almost in silhouette in a dark shadow, a beam of sunlight glints on the silk of her sleeve, her collar and her black bodice. The woman she talks to is in working clothes, stocky and strong-looking in heavy boots planted firmly in the sand under a short, tattered skirt. She hitches up her basket – probably full of fish for sale fresh from the sea. The beach may be a place for some to promenade, but for others it’s a place of work, and hard work at that.

For yet others, it’s a place for play. Dressed almost androgynously in their baggy trousers – just one little white bonnet under a hat suggests a girl – barefoot children by the small boat seem to squabble over a prize pebble or a shell, watched by an older boy in a pink jacket. Beside the group, a rusting anchor stands out against the waves. It rests on a beam, its rope snaking along the sand in the shadows.

Far out at sea almost on the misty horizon, with a single, fine stroke of the brush, Bakuizen paints a distant white sail. Once a calligrapher, he paints the small, white-topped waves with the same feeling for arcs and coils as he might have had for decorative, elegant writing. They roll in to the shore in scumbled curves of white over the deeper blues and greys that give his sea real depth and wetness.

A far cry from the limpid, almost luminous calm seas of Jan van de Cappelle – look at A Coast Scene, with a Small Dutch Vessel landing Passengers – in this picture, painted at the beginning of his career, Bakhuizen hints at the direction his painting will take: towards the huge, turbulent, terrifying seas of his later work in which he shows war ships and other vessels bucking through huge waves towards high cliffs that can endanger them, like An English Vessel and a Man-of-war in a Rough Sea off a Coast with Tall Cliffs.