After the Storm

After the Storm belongs to the last serene phase of Willem van de Velde the Younger, the finest marine painter of the Dutch Golden Age, whose calm harbors and silver sea-lanes hang beside those of his contemporary Aelbert Cuyp. In this small canvas of about 1700 the violence of the title is already spent: a weathered vessel rides at anchor on a swell that has fallen to a gentle rhythm, the last clouds still pink with the passage of the squall. Van de Velde’s exact draughtsmanship of rigging and hull — learned from his father in the fleets of the Anglo-Dutch wars — here serves a mood of quiet recovery, water, sky and sail composed into the pearly harmony that made his late pictures so prized in England, where he worked for Charles II. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.