Willem van de Velde, 'Dutch Vessels Inshore and Men Bathing', 1661

High, light clouds drift across the wide sky. All seems quiet at the end of the day. A man with a fishing basket strapped to his back squelches across the wet sand left by the ebbing tide, and the sun is still warm enough for a group of men and boys to skinny-dip in the shallow water. Two of them advance on the others, preparing to splash and cause a minor rumpus.

Close to us are inshore craft used for transporting goods and people. Clothes are hung out to dry on the kaag, while overhead the Dutch flag shifts in the faint breeze and the long white spritsail begins to fill, glowing with sunlight. The flat, calm water holds a misty reflection, and a well-dressed man gets a piggy-back ashore from a seaman with his trousers rolled up above his knees. The red coat of a man sitting in the stern brightens the dark colours of the curved, sea-worn planks of the kaag and the brown sail lowered in folds around him. Behind the kaag is a wijdschip, a larger working vessel. The lowered sail makes a soft edge behind which steam rises from a cooking pot where supper is being prepared. The wijdschip carries an orange-red striped flag at the peak of the mainsail, possibly signalling that it is from the town of Hoorn in the province of North Holland. Beyond the vessel, men and boys gather by the ancient seawall.

Further out to sea a fleet of warships is anchored. The nearest has its gunports open and the cannon run out, probably for practice. The ship flies the Dutch colours and a long pennant that signals that the commander is on board. Further away a second ship fires a salute, but nothing disturbs the rare, comfortable tranquillity of life on the inshore vessels brought by a summer evening.

This painting is one of the finest early works of Willem van de Velde the Younger. There are four versions of the scene, but it is this one that shows the hand of the master most clearly. Although Adriaen van de Velde, Willem’s young brother, sometimes painted the figures in Willem’s pictures and these ones have something of his style, it’s almost certain that Willem painted them himself.

The picture is signed in round letters on the horizontal stump of wood on the left: W. V. Velde 1661. The signature is similar to those Willem used later in his career when he became independent. At this point he was still working with his father, Willem van de Velde the Elder, in a tied apprenticeship; he would normally have signed with the pointed letters of the studio. It’s unlikely that Willem the Younger was free to paint pictures on his own account, but it is known that his father was in England making drawings of ships lying at Chatham for a greater part of 1661 – this picture may have been made without his knowledge.