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Lot Essay
Simon de Vlieger’s earliest coastal scenes, which date to the 1630s, were conceived in warm blonde tones in the style of his master, Jan Porcellis. By the early 1640s, his palette increasingly changed to the characteristic silvery gray tonalities of the present work. Such paintings proved decisively influential for a younger generation of marine painters, among them Willem van de Velde II.
De Vlieger frequently composed his beach scenes with a watch tower above dunes, figures selling fish at the high tide mark and various small watercraft beached on the undulating shore or wading in the shallows. Here, he has added further visual interest by including the large abandoned anchor with a peasant in a red cap trudging up the dunes toward a barrel in the painting’s foreground and a horse and carriage in the painting’s middle ground.
Though exhibited as a view of the beach of Scheveningen at the Rijksmuseum in 1929, the identification of the location as such can no longer be substantiated. The high hill at left surmounted by a tower does, however, closely recall the topography of the small beach village and its Oude Kerk, which is likewise situated close to the shore. The figures beside a makeshift tent in the lower left foreground appear to have served as a model for several subsequent works by or attributed to Hendrick Verschuring (formerly Alte Pinakothek, Munich), Cornelis de Bie (Dorotheum, Vienna, 20 October 2015, lot 219) and an anonymous Dutch artist active around 1650 (Hampel Kunstauktionen, Munich, 5 December 2008, lot 308).
The attribution to de Vlieger was endorsed at the time of the 2006 sale by the late Professor Jan Kelch, who believed it to be painted circa 1648.
De Vlieger frequently composed his beach scenes with a watch tower above dunes, figures selling fish at the high tide mark and various small watercraft beached on the undulating shore or wading in the shallows. Here, he has added further visual interest by including the large abandoned anchor with a peasant in a red cap trudging up the dunes toward a barrel in the painting’s foreground and a horse and carriage in the painting’s middle ground.
Though exhibited as a view of the beach of Scheveningen at the Rijksmuseum in 1929, the identification of the location as such can no longer be substantiated. The high hill at left surmounted by a tower does, however, closely recall the topography of the small beach village and its Oude Kerk, which is likewise situated close to the shore. The figures beside a makeshift tent in the lower left foreground appear to have served as a model for several subsequent works by or attributed to Hendrick Verschuring (formerly Alte Pinakothek, Munich), Cornelis de Bie (Dorotheum, Vienna, 20 October 2015, lot 219) and an anonymous Dutch artist active around 1650 (Hampel Kunstauktionen, Munich, 5 December 2008, lot 308).
The attribution to de Vlieger was endorsed at the time of the 2006 sale by the late Professor Jan Kelch, who believed it to be painted circa 1648.