Dr. Mathias Winner has, on the basis of a photograph, kindly confirmed the attribution and suggests a date of around 1620. He notes that the present drawing was probably intended as an independent work, rather than a preparatory study for a painting. The central group of three boats and a rowing boat alongside with a fourth boat sailing away appears, with slight variations, in drawings in the Budapest Museum (T. Gerszi, Netherlandish Drawings in the Budapest Museum, sixteenth century Drawings, Amsterdam/New York, 1971, no. 32a, illustrated) and in the Louvre (F. Lugt, Inventaire Général des Dessins des Ecoles du Nord, Ecoles Flamande, Paris, 1949, I, no. 483, pl. XXXVIII). The latter is comparable with the present drawing in the subtle contrast between the more detailed treatment of the ships in the foreground and the delicate, flickering penstrokes used in the background shipping and landscape