Ludolf Backhuysen

Albert Spalding, New York;
With Schaeffer Gallery, New York;
Anne Bigelow Rosen Stern, New York, until 1995;
By whom given to the present owner. 

According to the artist biographer Arnold Houbraken (1660-1715), Ludolf Backhuysen studied under the painters Hendrick Dubbels and Allaert van Everdingen. By 1658 he was officially recognized as a professional marine painter and in that same year executed the background for Bartholomeus van der Helst's Portrait of a Lady (Brussels, Musée des Arts Anciens, inv. no. 2942). Backhysen joined the Amsterdam guild of painters in 1663, after which point his reputation as a skilled specialist in marine painting quickly spread. High profile commissions soon followed, among them in 1665 one from the burgomasters of Amsterdam to paint a View of Amsterdam and the IJ (Paris, Louvre, inv. no. 988). It was an important honor for the artist as the picture was created as a diplomatic gift for Hugues de Lionne, Foreign Minister to King Louis XIV, and, as a symbol of the military and commercial strength of Amsterdam. When in 1672 Willem van de Velde the Younger and his father moved to England, Backhuysen immediately became the most important marine painter in the entire Netherlands. Such status brought with it commissions from the nobility throughout Europe, including, according to Houbraken, projects for Cosimo de’ Medici, King Frederick I of Prussia, the Elector of Saxony, and Tsar Peter the Great, each of whom apparently visited Backhuysen’s studio personally.

The present work is set on the Nieuwe Maas River, looking towards the city of Vlaardingen with a view of the Old Town Hall (built in 1650), the Grote Kerk and the harbor. Backhuysen depicted the city of Vlaardingen on various occasions, including a drawing in pen and ink located today in the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge (fig, 1), and a full oil painting formerly in the R.P. Goldschmidt collection, Frankfurt.

This impressive and atmospheric shipping scene would appear to have been painted in the 1680s, a period in which Backhuysen’s palette had become lighter and the coloring brighter. Not seen on the market for decades, the work beautifully combines  many of the artist’s hallmark characteristics, such as his interest in how differently sized ships—in this case a Man of War and smaller row boats--cope with the quickly changing elements, his fascination with light and how it cuts through clouds and hits sails, and his acute observation of choppy water. As with many of the artist's other works, the water itself is arguably the protagonist of the scene. Whereas in other works Backhuysen imbues the scene with high drama as massive tides crash against the various boats, here the artist has pulled slightly back, depicting smaller white capped waves, though the group of storm clouds accumulating in the sky at right adds an ominous sense of mystery and the suggestion of stormy weather ahead.

We are grateful to Laurens Schoemaker of the RKD, The Hague for supporting the attribution to Backhuysen, and for his assistance in the cataloguing of this lot. 

We are also grateful to Dr Gerlinde De Beer for supporting the attribution to Backhuysen. Dr. De Beer suggests a date of execution to circa 1695-1700.