M. Russell, Jan van Cappelle 1624/6–1679, Leigh-on-Sea 1975, p. 89, no. 6, reproduced plate 90.

Note: This is a particularly successful evocation of a nearly windless summer day in Dutch inshore waters. Seen from the water’s edge, small vessels rest to the left, while fishermen load creels onto a rowing boat to the right. In the centre a smalschip sails very slowly, close hauled, away from us, while beyond and to the right a states yacht, gaff half-raised, fires a salute. These vessels and others occupy a broad channel between the viewpoint and a low, partly fortified island. The calm sea is motionless apart from slight ripples coming inshore from the smalschip, and the steely blue-grey sea, the colour of the sky, reflects all the boats and figures. The view depicted is likely to be imaginary, but evokes the calm shallow waters of the Zuider-Zee or among the islands of Zeeland.

Jan van de Cappelle was well-off or even wealthy all his life, and there is ample evidence that he had no need to paint to earn a living. On the contrary, the inventory of his estate shows us that he had a vast art collection comprising over 200 paintings and about 6,000 drawings, as well as a speeljacht (pleasure yacht). There is no evidence that he ever received any formal training as a painter, and he referred to his art as a liefhebberij (hobby).1 His early works in particular are however clearly influenced by Simon de Vlieger, whom he copied, and it is believed that he may have worked in De Vlieger’s village of Weesp, not far from Amsterdam.

It has been proposed that works by Van de Cappelle on panel tend to date from before circa 1650, and those on canvas thereafter, but this assumption, based on the availability of Baltic oak panels which became scarcer by the 1660s, is over-simplified. On the other hand, the composition of this picture does speak for a dating before or around 1650, when Van de Cappelle tended to concentrate his marine subject matter in the centre of his compositions, leaving open vistas on either side, as is clearly the case here. In this, he puts clear water between himself and the painter who most influenced him: Simon de Vlieger. As Margarita Russell put it, his 'insistence on a centralised structure is another characteristic of Van de Cappelle which distinguishes him from De Vlieger, who, in similar compositions, prefers to leave the central portion of the picture empty'.2

Understanding Van de Cappelle’s chronology is hindered by the remarkable precocity of his early work, so that his earliest dated picture, of 1645, when he was around twenty, is a work of remarkable maturity: complex and beautifully resolved, with a low horizon line and a flawless understanding of the appearance of water and of boats. Furthermore, in later works until after 1660 he revisits themes and compositional types that he had essayed earlier. Nonetheless, speaking against a dating of circa 1650 or before for the present picture is a notable change of emphasis towards more simplified uncrowded compositions seen in Van de Cappelle’s works dating from shortly after 1650, with fewer vessels, less busy skyscapes, and a concentration of dated marines from the early and mid-decade with elements of the shore, or at least extreme shallows, in the foreground.

The present picture is remarkable in its gentle cloudscape. Many of Van de Cappelle’s skies are full of clouds, so much so that they sometimes seem to be trying to express something, being over-wrought, and are sometimes at odds with the tranquillity of the subject matter. Here, there is no sense of anything untoward in the heavens such as an impending change in the weather: this is a calm in the fourth dimension as well as the first three.

As Jan Kelch noted, many authors have suggested that Jan van de Cappelle's special palette was influenced by his study of Rembrandt, adding that Rubens should not be ruled out either.3 It seems more likely however that what marks him out as an exceptionally talented and highly original painter of marines is simply an acute ability to observe and transform what he had seen into paint, and a particular responsiveness to light, colour, tone and mood.