Seascape off Scheveningen Beach

On a broad stretch of strand at Scheveningen, fishermen and strollers gather beside the boats drawn up on the sand while fishing smacks lie at sea to the left, under a low sky of layered cloud. The picture belongs to the early years of Dutch marine painting, when the genre was just coming into its own beside the older traditions of landscape and sea. Its quiet, even light and the matter-of-fact rendering of fishing life reflect the beginnings, about 1629, of the great maritime school that would make the low-lying seascape a Dutch specialty.