Ships at Anchor on a Quiet Sea

Jan van de Cappelle — an Amsterdam silk merchant and shipowner who painted for his own pleasure — is generally reckoned the finest of the Dutch painters of the calm sea. He took the subject up after Jan Porcellis and the two Willem van de Veldes and gave it a wide, atmospheric stillness of his own, and although his surviving output is small it has been sought after since the seventeenth century: this canvas was once in the collection of the Empress Eugénie Bonaparte in Paris, and it came to the museum in 1961 with the gift of Mr and Mrs I. de Bruijn-van der Leeuw of Muri, near Bern. The Rijksmuseum notes that the view is taken from an inland harbour, and that the painter was concerned with the atmosphere of the scene rather than with a particular place or event. The painting is held in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.