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Lot Essay
Painted on a small panel, this picture is a testament to Ruysdael’s skilful technique, using unhesitating, entirely wet-in-wet brushwork to produce wonderful atmospheric tonalities. Sweeping across the panel, his wet loaded brush indicates a windswept sky and ripples on the water, with the trembling reflections of the vessels and their passengers.
Marked both by the expressive outlines and broad painterly strokes of the ‘tonal phase’ of the 1630s, and the brighter and more varied colours of his later career, this work is at a junction between two of Ruysdael’s great impulses. In moving away from the example of Jan van Goyen, he gives greater emphasis to the clouds and allows broader expanses of water to appear, gaining gentle recessions through sketchily abbreviated sailboats. Through abrupt interruptions of light and dark, he produces depth both beneath and across the water, with the foreground obscured by a seemingly dark cloud that gradates into the luminous distance, bathed in the soft half-light.
While it is difficult to establish a firm date for the picture, it is comparable in style to Seascape with Sailing Boat and Rowing- Boat dated 1642, formerly in the collection of Sir Edmund Bacon, Bt., suggesting that it may also have been executed in the 1640s, and in size and composition to Seascape with Sailing-Boat, sold Sotheby’s, 14 December 1977, lot 58, which may have been painted at a similar moment as the present picture (see P. C. Sutton, Dutch & Flemish Seventeenth-Century Paintings: The Harold Samuel Collection, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 179-180).
Marked both by the expressive outlines and broad painterly strokes of the ‘tonal phase’ of the 1630s, and the brighter and more varied colours of his later career, this work is at a junction between two of Ruysdael’s great impulses. In moving away from the example of Jan van Goyen, he gives greater emphasis to the clouds and allows broader expanses of water to appear, gaining gentle recessions through sketchily abbreviated sailboats. Through abrupt interruptions of light and dark, he produces depth both beneath and across the water, with the foreground obscured by a seemingly dark cloud that gradates into the luminous distance, bathed in the soft half-light.
While it is difficult to establish a firm date for the picture, it is comparable in style to Seascape with Sailing Boat and Rowing- Boat dated 1642, formerly in the collection of Sir Edmund Bacon, Bt., suggesting that it may also have been executed in the 1640s, and in size and composition to Seascape with Sailing-Boat, sold Sotheby’s, 14 December 1977, lot 58, which may have been painted at a similar moment as the present picture (see P. C. Sutton, Dutch & Flemish Seventeenth-Century Paintings: The Harold Samuel Collection, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 179-180).