Shipping in a Storm off the Norway Coast

The Norway coast provided Dutch marine painters with a different kind of coastal drama from the flat North Holland shore: rocky headlands, mountainous backgrounds, and a sea whose depth and darkness contrasted sharply with the shallow, sandy Dutch coastal waters. Bakhuizen's shipping-in-storm canvases were among his most widely collected works in Britain, where the naval tradition and the aesthetic of the sublime made Dutch storm paintings highly desirable. The Victoria Art Gallery in Bath holds a collection of British and European paintings assembled through local patronage and civic purchase; Dutch marine works entered many English provincial museums through the nineteenth-century dispersal of country house collections. The undated nature of this canvas places it in Bakhuizen's general production rather than a specific moment, but the Norwegian setting is consistent with his later career when he occasionally varied the geography of his marine subjects.

Oil on canvas, with the Norwegian setting requiring modifications to Bakhuizen's usual palette — the darker, cooler greens and blues of northern waters replace the warmer grey-greens of the Dutch North Sea. Rocky coastal topography demanded a different kind of foreground handling from his usual flat sand or open-water compositions, and passages of cliff face are rendered with drier, more textured brushwork than his fluid sea surfaces.