A Dutch ship and vessel under sail in a moderate breeze off a high coast

Adriaen Cornelisz. van Salm lived most of his life in Delfshaven, where he was a schoolteacher and a dealer in fabrics. On 19 October 1706, he was registered as Mr. Teykenaar (Master Draughtsman) with the Guild of Saint Luke in Delft. His known work consists only of penschilderen – a method of painting or drawing in ink, with pen and wash, on a prepared panel or canvas – resulting in highly refined monochromatic views of mainly harbor views and whaling scenes. The technique became especially popular with marine painters like Willem van de Velde the Elder beginning in the 1640s, but it had been employed to great effect earlier in the century in works like Hendrick Goltzius’ learned Sine Cerere et Libero friget Venus (Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus Would Freeze; c. 1600-03; Philadelphia Museum of Art).In his days, his native town was a center of the whaling industry.

The inventory made up after van Slam's death mentions an Exempel boek, probably consisting of the drawings he used for his penschilderen that indeed often show repeated motifs and compositions. In his technique, especially the combination of hatching in pen with the use of wash with the brush to indicate shadows, Salm closely followed Willem van de Velde the Elder. Typical for the master from Delfshaven is the use of a sharp object to scratch away ink from the surface to create certain effects. In contemporary documents, Adriaen van Salm is called both 'Salm' and 'van der Salm' (see J. Giltaij and J. Kelch, eds., Lof der Zeevaert, Rotterdam and Berlin, 1996, p. 463).