Simon de Vlieger, 'A Dutch Man-of-war and Various Vessels in a Breeze', about 1638-45

On a grey, sunless day, boats of all shapes and sizes are working hard to navigate a stiff breeze which is whipping up the tops of the waves and flattening the sails tight against the rigging.

In the middle distance, on the right, there is a frigate with a Dutch flag at the head of the mainmast; in the left foreground a gaff-rigged wijdschip, used for transporting people and goods in coastal waters. Both have their sails tied tightly to the right-hand side of the ship as they are battling to sail as close to the direction of the wind as possible. Others, such as the small open boat in the foreground and the other two gaff-rigged boats on either side of the wijdship, are having an easier time of it. They are running with the wind and must be travelling at some speed. We can also see a second warship at anchor and, very faintly on the horizon line, the shapes of many more boats.

This is a busy maritime scene, but there is nothing to distinguish a specific location. However, the fact that the water has remained relatively calm despite the strong wind, coupled with the sheer number of vessels sailing so close together and the presence of the very small open boat in the foreground, suggests we must be in relatively sheltered waters. Most likely this is set in the Rhine delta in southern Holland, where the river separates into a series of wide estuaries around Rotterdam, where Simon de Vlieger was born.

De Vlieger was one of the leading marine painters in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Maritime scenes were a very popular genre in a country where the thriving trade-based economy depended on an extensive merchant fleet and whose security was guaranteed by one of the world’s most powerful navies. The principal national transport system relied on thousands of small ferries which plied the network of canals, estuaries and rivers that linked virtually all the key towns and cities of the Netherlands. In the three or four decades after this painting was made, the genre was developed dramatically by artists like Jan van de Cappelle and William van de Velde the younger. De Vlieger was a generation older than them and his ability to capture the sea in different moods and render the details of ships and how they sailed with convincing accuracy was an important influence on them. He often signed his name on a piece of driftwood inserted into the foreground. Here, the paint has darkened and it is no longer legible, but it is written on the piece of wood which sticks out rather oddly in the extreme bottom left of the picture.