L’Orage

On a livid, heaving sea a packet boat fights the storm, the wind straining its sails so hard it could founder at any moment. A great sky filled with dark clouds occupies two thirds of the composition; the cottages at the left, the barrel tossed by the waves at the right, and the isolation of the sailboat in the foreground against those in the distance all heighten the drama of the scene. In the seventeenth century, Dutch painting saw the apogee of pictorial genre and the specialisation of categories — this canvas illustrates the “marine” genre in which Allart van Everdingen specialised at the start of his career, around 1640: he painted some thirty seascapes in these early years. The artist works in an almost monochrome palette of greys and enlivens the foam of the waves with small touches of white in relief. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-arts de la Ville de Paris.