Philips Wouwerman, 'Seashore with Fishwives offering Fish', 1650-68

Seashore with Fishwives offering Fish

Philips Wouwerman

Not on display

About the work

Overview

There is a cold grey dawn, but a promise of winter sun as the wind sweeps away the clouds on a Dutch seashore. A young horseman leans down towards a woman kneeling in the shadow of his mount – she holds a large fish up towards him. A patch of light picks out the white apron of a red-cheeked woman smiling up at him and, behind her, the rump of a white horse laden with fishing nets. The turn of its head and the pointing arm of a man nearby draw the eye to the boats in the distance.

Wouwerman is at his skilful best in this delicate and atmospheric scene. He painted detail and subtle colour on an oak board to facilitate the smooth running of the paint, achieving lightness and airiness in the fleeting clouds and depth in the shadows below.

In-depth

There is a cold grey dawn, but a promise of winter sun as the wind sweeps away the clouds on a Dutch seashore. A young horseman leans down towards a woman kneeling in the shadow of his mount – she holds a large fish up towards him. In front of her a man kneels, gutting more fish. Patches of light pick out the rider’s dog, the rump of a white horse laden with fishing nets and the white apron of a woman with red cheeks, arms crossed on her belly and smiling up at the horseman. The white horse turns its head to look out across the wide expanse of beach, its mane ruffled in the wind.

A man and a woman, heads together and huddled up in heavy clothes, sit just over the lip of the high sand dune on which the small group stand. The man’s arm points out towards small boats in the distance, but his finger curves down towards a man with a huge pack on his back, making heavy weather of the climb up towards them. Wouwerman cut away a part of the sand dune in a sideways curve to open the view of the beach to us, and used the horse’s gaze and the pointing arm to draw our eye to it. He seems to be suggesting that we could walk through the gap and on down towards the billowing white sails of the distant boats and the low hills beyond.

The patient white horse appears in many of Wouwerman’s pictures, three of them in the National Gallery: The Interior of a Stable, A White Horse, and an Old Man binding Faggots and A Horse being Shod outside a Village Smithy. He was an expert in painting horses, capturing the texture of their coats, their soft eyes and the sensation of muscles moving beneath flesh. The white horse seems to have appealed in his imagination as an animal ‘character’, but also as a means of catching light and a way to make otherwise dark, shadowy scenes more lively.

Wouwerman was one of the most successful seventeenth-century Dutch artists, able to paint in almost any genre (except portraiture) but specialising in landscape and scenes of battle – look at the enormous Cavalry attacking Infantry. In this delicate and atmospheric scene he is at his skilful best. He painted detail and subtle colour on an oak board, to facilitate the smooth running of the paint, achieving lightness and airiness in the fleeting clouds and depth in the shadows below.

It was once thought to be Wouwerman’s last painting, although there is no stylistic reason to believe this. Perhaps it imparts enough of a feeling of time passing that the notion isn't entirely surprising.

Key facts

Details

Full title: A View on a Seashore with Fishwives offering Fish to a Horseman
Artist: Philips Wouwerman
Artist dates: 1619 - 1668
Date made: 1650-68
Medium and support: oil on wood
Dimensions: 35.3 × 41.2 cm
Inscription summary: Signed
Acquisition credit: Bought, 1871
Inventory number: NG880
Location: Not on display
Collection: Main Collection
Previous owners: Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Bt
Frame: 20th-century Replica Frame

Provenance

In the collection of Queen Isabella Farnese (who married Philip V of Spain in 1714 and died in 1766); perhaps among the pictures removed from the Spanish royal palaces by the French, 1809–13. It was apparently bought in Spain by George A. Wallis and consigned for sale to W. Buchanan, London, in 1813. In the collection of Lord Charles Townshend by 1818, when it was exhibited at the BI; [Lord Charles Townshend] sale, London, 4 June 1819 (lot 29), bought by Rutley (305 gns). In the collection of Joseph Barchard and bought privately in 1823 by Thomas Emmerson; sold by John Smith to (Sir) Robert Peel (Bart.), by 1824. Purchased with the Peel collection, 1871.

Additional information

Text extracted from the ‘Provenance’ section of the catalogue entry in Neil MacLaren, revised and expanded by Christopher Brown, ‘National Gallery Catalogues: The Dutch School: 1600–1900’, London 1991; for further information, see the full catalogue entry.

Exhibition history

2009

Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668): Von Pferden und anderen Leidenschaften

Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Kassel)

1 July 2009 - 11 October 2009

Mauritshuis

12 November 2009 - 28 February 2010

Bibliography

1824

W. Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting: With a Chronological History of the Importation of Pictures by the Great Masters into England Since the French Revolution, London 1824
1830

J. Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish, and French Painters: In Which is Included a Short Biographical Notice of the Artists, with a Copious Description of Their Principal Pictures […], vol. 2, London 1830
1844

A.M. Jameson, Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries of Art in London: Containing Accurate Catalogues, Arranged Alphabetically, for Immediate Reference, Each Preceded by an Historical & Critical Introduction […], London 1844
1854

G.F. Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain: Being and Account of the Chief Collections of Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures, Illuminated Mss. […], vol. 2, trans. E. Eastlake, London 1854
1907

C. Hofstede de Groot, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, 10 vols, London 1907
1960

Maclaren, Neil, National Gallery Catalogues: The Dutch School, 2 vols, London 1960
1976

C. Brown, Art in Seventeenth Century Holland (exh. cat. The National Gallery, 30 September - 12 December 1976), London 1976
1983

C. Brown, 'Rubens' Watering Place: An Examination of His Landscape Technique', Ringling Museum of Art Journal, 1983, pp. 130-49
1988

A. Moore, Dutch and Flemish Painting in Norfolk: A History of Taste and Influence, Fashion and Collecting (exh. cat. Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, 10 September - 20 November 1988), London 1988
1991

Maclaren, Neil, revised by Christopher Brown, National Gallery Catalogues: The Dutch School, 1600-1900, 2nd edn (revised and expanded), 2 vols, London 1991
2001

C. Baker and T. Henry, The National Gallery: Complete Illustrated Catalogue, London 2001

About this record

If you know more about this painting or have spotted an error, please contact us. Please note that exhibition histories are listed from 2009 onwards. Bibliographies may not be complete; more comprehensive information is available in the National Gallery Library.

Images

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A Dune Landscape with a River and Many Figures

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Wouwerman’s small painting of the Dutch landscape is full of incident: everywhere are little stories to tell, details to pick out. The landscape in the distance seems empty but nearer to us people enliven the scene. Two horsemen studiously ignore the beggars who approach them. They‘re followed by...

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A Horse being Shod outside a Village Smithy

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Philips Wouwerman was an extremely successful painter in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century and was also a favourite in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His paintings – landscapes with rural scenes being enacted in them – are full of movement, small dramas and incident, capturing...

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A Stag Hunt

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A group of fashionably dressed aristocrats canter and prance round a stag at bay, threatened by hounds in for the kill. Other riders gallop up or splash through the shallow river to join in the excitement, hat feathers flying and horns whooping. The horses in particular are beautifully painted in...

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A Stream in the Dunes, with Two Bathers

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Far from the soft, rolling sand dunes at many seaside places, those in Wouwerman’s painting are craggy with rocks here and there. The stark outline of the broken fence against the sky seems forbidding, and the house up on the left bank, gable end facing us, seems to shut us out.Individual parts o...

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A White Horse, and an Old Man binding Faggots

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Winter threatens in Wouwerman’s little picture. Clouds tower up. An old man crouches in the undergrowth, gathering faggots (twigs bound up to make a fire). Behind him, a woman sits with her back to him, facing the weather and nursing a baby bundled up against the cold. A gnarled tree sheds its fe...

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Cavalry making a Sortie from a Fort on a Hill

Philips Wouwerman

Philips Wouwerman has captured the violence and cruelty of battle as it was in seventeenth-century Europe, when Holland was closely involved in the wars that raged across the continent. Most of the scene is in shadow, with details picked out in one or two flashes of colour: a horse’s rump, a red...

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Cavalrymen halted at a Sutler's Booth

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A large tent or booth has been set up on top of a hill above a military camp, next to a blasted tree. They stand upright against a big, luminous sky, together filling nearly half the picture.Dramatic though this backdrop is, it’s the cavalrymen gathered in the foreground whose antics are the main...

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The Interior of a Stable

Philips Wouwerman

Stables were found everywhere in the seventeenth century – but this is no ordinary one. A peacock is perched on a branch at the entrance. Outside, there’s part of a weathered but grand building; birds nest on its roof and climbing plants drift over windows. The entrance and the trees give an air...

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Two Horsemen at a Gipsy Encampment

Philips Wouwerman

Smoke seems to mingle with the clouds in this dramatic scene of Gypsies round a fire against a background of distant mountains and closer hills. Strong women carry babies slung round them in shawls, and here and there a man’s turban is visible. An old man tends the fire.A woman with a baby on her...

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Two Vedettes on the Watch by a Stream

Philips Wouwerman

In the Netherlands in the seventeenth century a vedette was a mounted sentry usually placed near an outpost – here, two of them are on watch by a stream. Wouwerman captures their watchfulness by turning their backs to us, making them look in opposite directions and leaning them forward as if they...

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Cavalry attacking Infantry

Studio of Philips Wouwerman

Philips Wouwerman was famous in his time for his skill at depicting horses in many different situations – at rest in the stable, being shod in the forge, out hunting or, as here, in the frenzy of battle. In what is a relatively small painting – not by Wouwerman himself but produced in his studio...

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You've viewed 6 of 11 works

Philips Wouwerman, 'Seashore with Fishwives offering Fish', 1650-68

About the work

Overview

In-depth

Key facts

Details

Provenance

Additional information

Source

Exhibition history

Bibliography

About this record

Images

More works by Philips Wouwerman