Simon Jacobsz. de Vlieger

Simon de Vlieger was a pioneer of Dutch marine painting, and influenced a succeeding generation of marine painters, including Willem van de Velde and Jan van de Cappelle, who may have been his pupils in Weesp around 1650. A low horizon line and a reduction of colour so that silvery-grey tones predominate, with a hint of cool blue in the sky, distinctive characteristics of this work, reveal him to be in marine painting the counterpart of landscape contemporaries in Leiden and Haarlem. De Vlieger understood how clouds cause shadows on the water, and uses the transition from foreground shadow to sunlit middle-ground to the left to convey recession, placing the rowing vessel at the point of transition from light to shade to give scale.

It is relatively unusual to depict specific fishing subjects in Dutch marine painting despite the importance of fishing to the Dutch economy (the majority of the catch was exported), but the eye is drawn in this painting to the herring buss running under foresail. De Vlieger painted the herring fleet in several works. In another unsigned panel in Rotterdam datable circa 1649–50, the herring nets put out during the night are being hauled at dawn into busses at anchor under stay-sail, the sky reflected in the water a baleful daybreak yellow.¹ The Dutch herring fleet fished off the east coast of England and Scotland, often with escorts of Men O' War to protect them from the very real threat of pirates or (one presumes) envious locals, just as fishery protection and naval vessels protect fishing fleets today.² In a work of 1650–51 in Budapest, Dutch herring busses under fore- and stay-sail are escorted by a Man O' War, with fishermen in a rowing boat near the picture plain, with, as in the present picture, a man at the bows holding a boat-hook, possibly to capture a rope or marker buoy indicating a net. 

This painting is probably a little earlier than the others, datable to the mid-circa 1640s.

¹ Maritiem Museum Prins Hendrik, Rotterdam; see J. Kelch, in Praise of Ships and the Sea. The Dutch marine Painters of the 17th Century, J. Giltaij and J. Kelch (eds), exh. cat., Rotterdam 1997, pp. 193–95, no. 36, reproduced.

² Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest; Rotterdam 1997, p. 194, under no. 53, reproduced p. 193, fig. 1.