Estuary at Day's End

c. 1640/1645

Simon de Vlieger

Associated Names
Simon de Vlieger
Painter, Dutch, 1600/1601 - 1653
Clouds surge across a steel-blue sky over a gently rippling body of water in this horizontal landscape painting. The horizon comes a quarter of the way up the composition and the water in the bottom quarter is painted with shades of slate blue and gray with pearl-white highlights where the low sun skims across the surface. A rowboat to the left is piled with barrels and six men. A masted sailboat is moored on a sandbar to the right, leaning sharply away from us as three men tend to the hull. Dark gray smoke billows from a flickering orange flame under a long-legged pot farther back on the sandbar. A pier-like structure constructed with thick, weathered logs juts out of the water along the right edge of the composition. One long pole with a barrel impaled on the end reaches more than halfway up the painting. White smoke curls around a three-masted ship farther out in the water, beyond the sandbar, and at least nine sails dot the distant horizon to the left. Sunlight streaks vertically from behind a screen of clouds in the top left corner of the composition, and puffy, pale gray clouds pile against a pale blue sky in the right two-thirds of the painting.

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By the mid-seventeenth century the Dutch were the greatest sea power in the world. Their ships dominated the oceans, ensuring not only the military security of the Republic but also its prosperity. Indeed, the combination of regional and global trade brought everything from exotic spices to bulk staples, such as grain and salt, to the Dutch ports.

Simon de Vlieger's most innovative paintings, including this Estuary at Day’s End, capture the flavor of daily life along the Dutch coast. In this restrained and sensitive composition, two workers apply tar to the hull of a ship resting on a sandbar at low tide. Black smoke from the fire that heats the tar rises up toward the towering clouds, while dramatic rays of light break through the thinner layer of clouds on the left. In the background, smoke erupts from the cannon of a large Dutch ship firing a salute. The scene is simple, but the effects of light and atmosphere give the painting a tremendous sense of drama, and these qualities can be fully appreciated thanks to the work's remarkable state of preservation.

De Vlieger was one of the most important and influential Dutch marine painters. A versatile artist, he was equally comfortable painting dramatic storms or stately naval parades, all of which he enlivened with small figures carefully situated within the pictorial context. He clearly knew the sea and the ships that sailed it: he accurately recorded the distinguishing features of the various types of vessels—from large navy ships to small fishing and transport boats—and set them convincingly in the water. But De Vlieger's sensitivity to the atmospheric effects of water and sky along the North Sea truly separates him from most other marine painters. He was unmatched in capturing the subtle ranges of grays and gray-blues found along coastal waters.

On View
West Building, Main Floor, Gallery M50
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Artwork overview

More About this Artwork

Video:  Two-Minute Tour: Clouds, Ice, and Bounty

Join exhibition curator Betsy Wieseman on a two-minute tour of the 2021-2022 exhibition Clouds, Ice, and Bounty.

Scholarly Article:  Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century: Estuary at Day's End, c. 1640/1645

This horizontal painting shows a group of eight light-skinned musicians and onlookers gathered closely around a rectangular, carpet-covered table. The front edge of the table runs parallel to the bottom edge of the painting, and seems close to us. Shown from about the waist up, the men and women’s vivid lapis-blue, coral-red, buttercup-yellow, lilac-purple, and moss-green garments fall in crisp folds. Bright reflections on the fabric suggest a satin-like material. Two women wear feathers in their hair and one man’s hat is plumed. One man, wearing crimson red and black, sits with his back to us to our left on the near side of the table. He holds the neck of a bass viol, about the size of a cello, with his left hand, and points to pages of an open music book with the bow in his right hand. The other people cluster on the far side of the table. A man to the left plays a violin; a woman at the center plays a guitar-sized bandora, and a woman to our right plays a lute. The musicians, along with a man who leans over the table from between the two women, look down at the music books. A young man behind the woman at the center holds up a glass of pale liquid with his right hand as he touches his left forefinger to his smiling lips. A man and woman stand close together in the background to our right, in the top right corner of the canvas.

Scholarly Series:  Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Edward Donner, Hurstbourne Park, Hampshire, England, by 1990; sold 1997 through (Gurr-Johns, London) to NGA.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1990

  • Loan for display with permanent collection, National Gallery, London, 1990-1995.

1998

  • A Collector's Cabinet, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1998, no. 64, fig. 25.

2000

  • Art for the Nation: Collecting for a New Century, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2000-2001, unnumbered catalogue, repro.

  • The Glory of the Golden Age: Dutch Art of the 17th Century, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2000, exhibition catalogue in two volumes, no. 85 (of Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Art catalogue), repro., as Seascape in the Morning.

2018

  • Water, Wind, and Waves: Marine Paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2018, unnumbered brochure, fig. 8.

2021

  • Clouds, Ice, and Bounty: The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Collection of Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Paintings, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2021, no. 1, repro.

Bibliography

1998

  • Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr. A Collector's Cabinet. Exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1998: 35, 68, no. 64, fig. 25.

2000

  • Kiers, Judikje, and Fieke Tissink. The glory of the Golden Age: Dutch art of the 17th century. 2 vols. Edited by Jan Piet Filedt Kok and Bart Cornelis. Vol. 1: Painting, sculpture and decorative art. Exh. cat. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2000: 1:5, no. 85.

  • National Gallery of Art. Art for the Nation: Collecting for a New Century. Exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2000: 36-37, color repro.

2004

  • Hand, John Oliver. National Gallery of Art: Master Paintings from the Collection. Washington and New York, 2004: 211, no. 167, color repro.

2007

  • Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr., and Michael Swicklik. "Behind the Veil: Restoration of a Dutch Marine Painting Offers a New Look at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and History." National Gallery of Art Bulletin no. 37 (Fall 2007): 4, fig. 4.

Inscriptions

lower right: S DE VLIEG[ER]

Wikidata ID

Q20177169

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