Fisherfolk unloading their catch on the seashore

The most accomplished and successful Dutch horse painter of the seventeenth-century, Philips Wouwerman was a remarkably versatile artist whose subjects included battle and hunting scenes, army camps, smithies, stables and a handful of marine and religious and mythological paintings. The present painting belongs to a small group of just over two-dozen beach scenes that Wouwerman undertook between the early 1650s and 1665, roughly half of which are today in public collections.

Schumacher dates the present painting to the first half of the 1650s, a period when Wouwerman’s art ‘reached its first great pinnacle’ (op. cit., p. 66). It was in the years immediately preceding the painting’s production that Wouwerman first eschewed the brownish-yellow tonality of his early works in favor of harmonious, silvery compositions in which the space is structured through its formal components. Equally important was his increased use of local color – note the standing woman in red in the painting’s foreground and the seated figures in the middle ground – to structure the pictorial space beneath an expansive, cloud-filled sky. Also characteristic of paintings of this period is the emphasis here on a man-centered, cultivated Dutch landscape: fishmongers, riders loading provisions and fishermen about to set sail all avail themselves of earth’s bounty. In the words of Schumacher, this enabled Wouwerman to achieve ‘a perfect synthesis of genre and landscape’ (op. cit., p. 67).