Attributed to Adriaen van de Velde Amsterdam 1636 - 1672

Possibly Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), London; 
Possibly his deceased sale, London, 30 March 1789, lot 28 (according to Robinson, p. 849);
Earls of Warwick, Warwick Castle, by 1897;
Thence by descent to Lord Brooke, by 1981;
By whom sold, London, Sotheby's, 3 July 1997, lot 179;
With David Koetser, Zurich, where bought by the late husband of the present owner in 1999.

Inventory of Warwick Castle, 1893, as being in the Chapel Passage and Compass Room, "Small Coast Scene (Vandervelde)";
Frances Evelyn, 5th Countess of Warwick, 'Warwick Castle', in The Pall Mall Magazine, January 1897;
Editorial: Gainsborough's Collection of Pictures, in Burlington Magazine, vol. 84, 1944, p. 109, no. 28 in the list (all the above as by Van de Velde);
M.S. Robinson, The Paintings of the Van de Veldes, Greenwich 1990, vol. II, pp. 848-49, cat. no. 354, reproduced.

This small shore scene is part of a group of four pictures, all considered by Robinson to be painted by Adriaen van de Velde for the Willem van de Velde studio around 1652 (see Literature below). All four scenes are similar in their simplicity of composition, the unrefined excecution of the figures and the handling of shadows and waves (idem, pp. 846-8, cat. nos 352.1-2 and 353, all three reproduced). According to Robinson's dating, Adriaen would have been 15 or 16 years of age when painting these scenes, and was still more concerned with a well-balanced composition than with technical detail. The figures, waves, ships in the distance and several clouds are almost symmetrically placed.

Adriaen would develop his style considerably in the years to follow, as can for example be seen in the Beach of Scheveningen in the Staatliche Gemäldegalerie, Kassel (inv. no. GK 374) and in a work attributed to Van de Velde, both dated 1658, in which a similar handling of the figures and the waves with the present painting can be observed (see W. Stechow, Dutch Landscape Painting in the Seventeenth Century, New York 1966, pp. 108-9, reproduced fig. 213 and 215).

Drs. Bart Cornelis rejects the attribution to Adriaen van de Velde on the basis of first-hand inspection.