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Notes
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At dusk, a heavy sky bears down onto the shallow coastal waters. Small patches of azure creep into the sky and large, murky clouds move ponderously across the horizon, following a diagonal from lower left to upper right. Human activity, encapsulated in the lowermost quarter of the composition, is secondary to the prevalence of the immense sky. The artist has condensed the activity into the bottom quarter of the painting, and devoted the rest of it to a dramatic depiction of the sky. The economic significance of fishing in the Netherlands during this period is not to be underestimated. Ludovico Guicciardini had described the sea ‘not only as a neighbour, but as a member of these Low Countries, as well for the great benefit that it bringeth to them…’ This painting depicts the mundane reality of fishing and the commitment it demands.
Like his contemporary, Jan van Goyen, Julius Porcellis explored the depiction of lightning and related effects. Heavy weather may threaten, here, but it may pass over the scene of everyday fishing activity. During the 1630s and 1640s, the pursuit of realism in landscape painting led artists to represent unsightly or bad weather, known as vuil weer, as a subject with equal validity to fine weather. An atmospheric idiosyncrasy such as lightning probably delighted Porcellis, who successfully added it to his visual vocabulary of realist images. Such representations of foul weather later came to be reviled. The late seventeenth-century artist and theorist Gérard de Lairesse derided them as the ‘schilderachtig onschoone’: the ‘picturesque ugly’.
Title
Fishermen on Shore Hauling in their Nets
Date
c.1640
Medium
oil on panel
Measurements
H 39.3 x W 54.6 cm
Accession number
BHC0805
Work type
Painting
Inscription description
I P
