A view of the beach at Egmond aan Zee with an elegant family near a carriage, huntsmen, fishermen and other figures

On 5 April 1571 Egmond aan Zee fell victim to the notorious pirate Bartel Entes, whose men plundered its houses and set fire to the Sint Agneskerk, the tower of which can be seen rising above the dunes at left. While the nave burned, the tower survived. Some fifty years later, the nave was rebuilt with funds generated by taxing fishermen one stuiver apiece for the right to sell their catch in the town and along its beaches. Egmond aan Zee was an exceptionally popular subject for a large number of Dutch landscapists active in the middle of the seventeenth century, among them Jacob van Ruisdael and Salomon van Ruysdael, far outstripping its geographic and economic importance. Such images no doubt appealed for their picturesque qualities but, in light of the village’s history, may also have stood as visual embodiments of the resilience and civic-mindedness for which the Dutch prided themselves in the period.

The present composition must have been a success as Dubbels painted an identical version in collaboration with Johannes Lingelbach, who painted the figures and signed the painting, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (U. Middendorf, op. cit., p. 141, no. 82). Two very similar views of Egmond aan Zee were painted by his contemporaries Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraten, who occasionally also worked with Lingelbach, Museum fur Bildende Kunste, Leipzig (see J.L. Bol Die Holländische Marinemalerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, Braunschweig, 1973, p. 287, fig. 288) and Anthonie Beerstraten, Christie’s, London, 3 December 1997, lot 24.

Dubbels spent his entire career in his native Amsterdam as a painter of seascapes and a handful of winter and moonlit landscapes. There, he worked with and for some of the preeminent marine painters of his day – Simon de Vlieger, Willem van de Velde I and Ludolf Bakhuizen – and developed close contacts with others, including Jan van de Cappelle and Willem van de Velde II. Dated by Ulrike Middendorf to circa 1653-58 (loc. cit.), this painting belongs to Dubbels’ best period, when he ranked alongside Van de Cappelle and the younger Van de Velde as one of Amsterdam’s leading marine painters.