Jacob van Ruisdael, 'Vessels in a Fresh Breeze', probably about 1660-5

Jacob van Ruisdael painted many landscapes, but few marine pictures; the ones he did make are all simply views of the sea off the coast of Holland, with small sailing vessels usually in a wind varying from fresh to gale force. He didn‘t portray the great naval and merchant vessels that filled Dutch waters at the time, nor did he show battles or other important naval events.

Earlier painters often gave a metaphorical meaning to their marine pictures, such as the ’voyage of life‘ or ’ship of state’, but it’s unlikely that van Ruisdael was doing so. This would suggests that his marine paintings were made for private patrons or for the open market rather than company or municipal commissions (for which a metaphorical meaning with a moral message might be appealing).

In this painting a small sailing vessel, probably a kaag (an inshore ferry boat), is driven before a fresh breeze under a vast, stormy sky, with a couple of passengers bundled up against the cold. A patch of blue sky suggests that the storm is passing, but it appears that the little boat will be under the clouds for a while as it races along, keeping up with them. The vessel’s honey-coloured sails soften the starkness of the scene, making it seem an everyday journey that travellers by sea would be used to. The white sails of the boats speeding away from us give a sense of exhilaration rather than bleakness or danger. The motif of the waves breaking over the pilings of a jetty is repeated in many of van Ruisdael’s marine pictures.

Only one drawing of a marine subject exists by van Ruisdael, but his colleague Allart van Everdingen made several. Van Ruisdael used van Everdingen’s many sketches of Scandinavian landscapes as an inspiration for his own pictures of mountains and waterfalls; he may have used the marine sketches as a source as well.

Van Ruisdael’s early marine paintings seem to have been influenced by Jan Porcellis and Simon Vlieger, two successful marine artists who changed an earlier style of bird’s eye views – rather like maps with ships on them – to more realistic scenes. In these new pictures, as a means of suggesting distance, the horizon was lowered and the sea in the foreground was usually dark, with a band of light catching the waves and the important vessels in the centre, and another darker band out towards the horizon – as van Ruisdael has done in this picture. Later he abandoned this device for a less precise demarcation of the dark lines with a more even distribution of light, giving a feeling of a more immense space and elemental power to the scene – as in Sailing Vessels in a Stormy Sea on a Rocky Coast (private collection, Vienna).