A Dutch fishing boat in a squall with an elegant man on horseback in the shallow tide, other fishing vessels beyond

This is one of a number of paintings in Bakhuizen's oeuvre depicting a marine with figures on the shore in the foreground. The genre is, of course, hardly limited in Dutch art, but Bakhuizen had a particular felicity for painting staffage that makes these amongst the most attractive of his paintings. Other examples include the picture of 1692 in the Detroit Institute of Arts or the celebrated Approaching Storm of 1682 in the Staatliches Museum, Schwerin. In addition, a number of these pictures represented historical events or scenes, presumably frequently the result of direct commissions reflecting his status as one of the leading marine painters of his day - for example the Dutch ships in the roads of the Texel with the 'Gouden Leeuw', the flagship of Cornelis Tromp in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, or the three paintings depicting The Arrival of William III of Orange at the Oranjepolder on 31 January 1691 (one in the Mauritshuis, The Hague; two at Het Loo, Apeldoorn).

The present painting is of particular interest as the basis for one of the engravings executed by Bakhuizen for his D'Y Stroom en Zeegezighten (see fig. 1), a collection of harbour and coastal scenes preceded by a representation of the Maid of Amsterdam in a triumphal chariot. Largely intended as a means of encouraging commissions, the engravings were presumably chosen by Bakhuizen as exemplifying his work, and it is therefore an indication of the artist's own satisfaction with the present picture that he included it, with a few minor changes in the staffage, in that set.