Ludolf Bakhuizen (Dutch, 1631-1708), "Dutch Men o'War and Smaller Craft at a Port near Amsterdam", 1680s/1690s, oil on canvas, unsigned, 25 1/2 in. x 32 in., in a carved and gessoed giltwood frame, with artist's plaque on recto.
PLEASE NOTE: Provenance: With the collector, Wayne Francis Palmer (1895-1983), Springlake Plantation, Mobile, AL; thence by descent in the Palmer Family. Note: This fine picture is a work in Bakhuizen's most characteristic manner, well representing his status as the leading marine painter in Holland for the 35 years following the departure of the Van de Veldes for England in 1672/73. Its composition and details are nearly identical with a signed picture of 1701 differing only marginally in size (27 3/4 x 37 1/8 in.), representing Men O' War with a Galley and Other Shipping (Sotheby's London, 12 December 2002, lot 30): the banners and pennant-as in this painting signifying command by an Admiral of the Main-with the billowing sails on the near vessel, and the furled rigging on the farther, the glimpse of another ship (in this case a fluyt, or flute) at the left margin, and the loaded ferry, are all in essentially the same positions, and oriented in the same sense, as in this picture. Another very close parallel is a prominently signed smaller painting of Shipping on the Ij of the 1680s (Sotheby's London, 7 July 2010, lot 33), in which the proportions of the various masts to the height of the picture are even more analogous, as is the medium chop on the shallow water. Many of these same similarities of pictorial size and motifs are shared by other pictures of Bakhuizen's; and-apart from a more tempestuous setting-the shape of the sails here closely mirrors those in the National Gallery of Art's early masterpiece of Ships Off a Rocky Coast, signed in 1667. Though born on the far side of the Ems estuary and first trained as a clerk in his native East Friesian town of Emden, Bakhuizen moved with his family to Amsterdam in 1649, where he came under the influence of Willem Van de Velde the Elder, and practiced the same style of fine marine drawing that emphasized his naturally superior calligraphy. He is reliably said to have learned to paint marine subjects in oils from Hendrik Dubbels (1620/1-1676?) and Allart van Everdingen (1621-1675), and was already recognized for that specialty by 1658-though he did not join the Amsterdam guild of painters until 1663, and did not declare his profession as a painter until his third marriage in 1664 (to a lady who left him a considerable fortune on her death in 1678, after which he married again). His fame brought European recognition: the Grand-Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo III de' Medici, the Elector of Saxony, Frederick I of Prussia, and the Tsar of Russia, Peter the Great, all frequented his studio (where the latter is said to have taken drawing lessons). His concentration on the sea around Amsterdam, and the shipping that made it great, is beautifully epitomized in this fine picture of East Indiamen at anchor before their mercantile warehouses, and the harbor traffic between them.