Fischmarkt

Fischmarkt (Fish Market), painted in 1668 and now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, takes Ochtervelt outside his characteristic refined interior setting into the more public world of market commerce — a subject that occupied many Dutch painters interested in documenting the full social range of urban life. Fish markets were major institutions in Dutch and Flemish cities, the fish trade connecting the North Sea fishing industry to urban consumers through a complex commercial system. The Kunsthistorisches Museum's holding reflects the Habsburg collection's systematic acquisition of Dutch and Flemish painting from the seventeenth century onward, and Ochtervelt's work sits within one of the world's most distinguished repositories of Northern European art.

The outdoor market setting required Ochtervelt to adapt his interior painting skills to a different spatial and lighting context: the open-air market had diffuse, indirect light rather than the focused interior illumination of his domestic scenes. The fish on display — herring, cod, flatfish — present varied surface textures from the iridescent scales of fresh fish to the duller tones of preserved or older specimens.