Fishing Boats: A Roughish Sea

Bakhuizen painted fishing boats in rough conditions throughout his career, returning to the subject as both a commercial staple and a vehicle for exploring the subtleties of wind-driven wave motion. The Victoria and Albert Museum, though primarily a museum of applied and decorative arts, holds a number of Dutch and Flemish paintings that entered its collections through bequests and purchases in the nineteenth century, when the institution was still building a broader fine art holding. Fishing boats — smaller, humbler vessels than the warships and East Indiamen that dominate Bakhuizen's most celebrated canvases — offered a different pictorial scale: the human figure becomes more visible in relation to the vessel, and the social reality of ordinary maritime labour comes to the fore. A freshening or rough sea, rather than a full storm, was a technically interesting subject because it required Bakhuizen to calibrate atmospheric effects precisely: not calm, not catastrophic, but the particular energy of a wind-raked afternoon on the North Sea.

Oil on canvas, worked with the palette Bakhuizen standardised by his middle period: warm ochre and sienna underlayers in the sky, successive cool grey-green layers in the sea, and bright white impasto highlights on the wave crests. Fishing vessels are rendered with slightly less rigging complexity than men-of-war, their broader, lower hulls responding to the wave motion with a different visual rhythm than the tall-sided warships.