The Storm on the Sea of Galilee

Rembrandt painted The Storm on the Sea of Galilee in 1633, his only known seascape, depicting Christ's stilling of the storm that had terrified his disciples with the full dynamism of Baroque compositional energy. The painting was produced during Rembrandt's most theatrically ambitious early period, when he was competing with Rubens for the title of the greatest painter of dramatic narrative in the Low Countries. The diagonal composition — the boat plunging into a wave while figures brace against the wind and rigging — draws on the tradition of Flemish marine painting while adding Rembrandt's characteristic psychological focus on the disciples' terror and Christ's unperturbed authority. The painting entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum collection in Boston, one of the finest private collections assembled in America, where it hung until March 1990 when it was stolen in the largest art theft in American history. Still missing after more than three decades, it remains one of the most searched-for works of art in the world, its absence from public view adding a particular melancholy to any discussion of the painting.

The dramatic composition splits the boat diagonally between shadow and light, with the billowing sail and churning waves painted with vigorous, dynamic brushwork that conveys the violence of the storm.