Fishing Boats in Choppy Waters

Jan Porcellis is regarded as the founder of tonal marine painting, the artist who freed the Dutch seascape from crowded battle scenes and turned the open sea itself into the subject. Working in the 1620s and 1630s, he built a small oeuvre of quiet, atmospheric marines that collectors hoarded and younger painters, among them Jan van Goyen and later Rembrandt, studied closely. He transformed Dutch marine painting into its tonal phase — the critic Samuel van Hoogstraten called him “the great Raphael of sea painting” — and his grey, luminous handling of water became the lingua franca of the genre.