Adam Willaerts Antwerp 1577 - 1664 Utrecht

With Gebr. Douwes, Amsterdam, before 1933
By whom sold, Amsterdam, Mak van Waay, 28 November 1933, lot 365;
Private Collection, The Netherlands.

L.J. Bol, Die Holländische Marinemalerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, Braunschweig 1973, p. 65, reproduced p. 66, fig. 62.

Willaerts started his career as a marine painter, probably after he settled in Utrecht in 1602, by painting mannerist sea-battles and sea-storms with high horizon-lines in the tradition of Hendrick Vroom's early style, and Andries van Eertvelt. By the early years of the second decade of the 17th Century however, he had developed a much more naturalistic style, the transformation completed by the time he painted the Beach Scene with Fishermen unloading their Catch in 1613 (formerly with P. de Boer, Amsterdam; see Bol under Literature below, p. 64, reproduced fig. 60).  In the present beautifully balanced composition, he develops that subject, by setting the beach within the confines of a harbour or river-mouth, with a town facing it to the left. While he continued to treat battle scenes and other historical subjects, his style and compostional formulae changed only slowly throughout the rest of his career, since nothing more than a slight muting of his palette marks his response to the tonal marine style that came into fashion in the 1630s, and he saw no need to lower his horizons further than about a third of the way up the picture plane, as here.