A capriccio view of the harbour at Naples, with the Castelnuovo, Lanterna del molo and Vesuvius beyond, with fishermen and stevedores; and A capriccio view of the harbour at Naples, with the Castel dell'Ovo, men playing cards, stevedores unloading their boats, a ship being caulked and the open sea beyond

Manglard is seen as the father of a certain genre of marine painting, examplified in these works. The godson of Adriaen van der Cabel, from whom he learnt figure painting, Manglard travelled to Rome in 1715, where he spent much of his time making studies of ships. His skill as a marine painter was such that he soon had such prestigious clients as Philip, Duke of Parma, and the Rospigliosi family in Rome. In 1735 he was accepted into the Accademia di S. Luca in Rome and a year later by the Académie Royale in Paris. Throughout his career Manglard concentrated on seascapes, developing his own style by accommodating Northern realism within the classical idealism of Claude; this he passed on to Claude-Joseph Vernet, who may have trained in his studio.

A precise and attentive draughtsman, Manglard produced numerous sketches of the motifs which appear and reappear in his painted works; his accurate recording of details of rigging and ship construction with a view to consultation before the easel echoes the practice of his great northern antecedent, Willem van the Velde the Younger. Various drawings also record figures and incidental detail, such as the caulking process shown in the background here, and other shipyard work (see S. Maddalo, Adrien Manglard, 1695-1760, Rome, 1982, figs. 78-81). The vessel at the centre of the latter of the two works presented here reoccurs precisely in one of another pair of capriccio harbour scenes, in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin (see fig. 1).