Warship in rough seas with fishermen in the foreground

This 1701 canvas at the New-York Historical Society dates from near the end of Bakhuizen's career and represents his sustained engagement with the dramatic pairing of naval warships and working fishing craft. The contrast between the massive, armed man-of-war and the small fishing boats in the foreground was a compositional strategy that Dutch marine painters — including the van de Veldes and Jan van de Cappelle — had employed for decades to dramatise scale and social difference. By 1701 Bakhuizen was in his late sixties and had been the pre-eminent marine painter in Amsterdam for thirty years; works of this date show no decline in technical command but a certain codification of compositional solutions he had developed at the height of his powers. The New-York Historical Society acquired Dutch and Flemish works through nineteenth-century American collections whose founders often emulated the taste of the European educated classes.

In oil on canvas Bakhuizen built the sea with his characteristic layered method, the warship's dark hull providing a strong vertical counterweight to the horizontal pull of the wave-broken surface. The rough sea around the fishing boats in the foreground is handled with energetic impasto highlights, while the warship further back is painted in thinner, more controlled layers that suggest atmospheric recession. The sky's cloud formations are modelled with soft, broad brushwork.