Jan van de Cappelle, 'A Coast Scene', about 1650-5

A quiet sea under a vast sky. In spite of the calm, there’s a light wind. Grey clouds billow, with enough breaks to cast a luminous light on the water. Two slender poles in midstream mark the safe course up the river at low water, their reflections long because of the angle of the sun.

The sails of a small boat fill as it heads out from harbour. At the peak flies a red and white flag, echoed by the matching flag on the incoming boat slipping home with the tide. They may be two ferries from the same town passing each other, the flags identifying them as from the port of Dordrecht, south of Amsterdam.

Flags were of great importance in the Dutch Republic – they celebrated the new identity of an increasingly prosperous nation – and none more so than the red, white and blue flag of the Republic. We see it on the wijdschip, the larger boat anchored in the shadows. On board people wait patiently, their silhouettes dwarfed by the tall sail. A smaller boat brings passengers ashore. They and their clothes are visible enough to make out characters –- merchants wear wide-brimmed hats or white collars, while others wear heavy workaday coats. One figure looks out expectantly to the shore; one stands as if in charge, taking fares perhaps. Others are hunched in conversation.

Elsewhere, a barefoot man – perhaps a fisherman, perhaps a beachcomber – trudges along the wet shingle heaving a basket on his back. Another man, on the right, stands in his boat, hands in pockets, his gaze on us. In the distance is a building with a stunted but sturdy spire, probably a round tower, part of the city’s fortifications that can still be seen in Amsterdam today.

The new-found wealth of the Republic came over the sea, largely from the East and West Indies, brought in on the great merchant ships featured in paintings by Willem van der Velde and Ludolf Bakhuizen. But van de Cappelle usually confined himself to the vaulted skies, flat landscape and domestic shipping of the Netherlands that he shows in this picture. Using the cool colours and limited palette of his early career he captures the pearly light and reflections of the estuary in a composition that’s harmonious, but with its stillness and dark clouds is at the same time brooding and atmospheric. Later in his short career he adopted mellower colours, giving a warmer, often busier sensation to his paintings.

Van de Cappelle was a wealthy merchant in the city of Amsterdam and a self-taught artist who painted only part time – he is sometimes described as ‘a Sunday painter’. He specialised in the marine paintings so much in demand in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Perhaps because of his own life in commerce, he understood the taste of his audience for these pictures, which often feature as a picture within a picture on the walls in Dutch interiors and genre paintings.