Fishermen displaying their catch on a rocky coast

Birgit Schumacher proposed in her catalogue raisonné a dating of circa 1650-52 for this painting (loc. cit.), when the artist first succeeded, as Schumacher has noted, in ‘capturing convincing depth using an ideational diagonal’ (ibid., p. 65). Similarly, in this period Wouwerman’s figures became less dominant and the artist better integrated them within a landscape bathed in a diffuse, cool light. While Wouwerman still drew inspiration from other Haarlem artists, including Pieter van Laer and Isack van Ostade, by the late 1640s he had distinguished himself as an outstanding painter of horses, depicting them in complicated positions like that of the foreshortened dark horse seen from behind in the right foreground. Such intensely naturalistic qualities cannot be found in the works of his contemporaries.

French collectors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries voraciously acquired paintings by Wouwerman. This painting was formerly in the collection of the Marquis de Saint-Clou, which was dispersed in Paris sales in 1874, 1885 and 1889. The Marquis de Saint-Clou's collection included a multitude of seventeenth-century northern landscapes and contemporary French paintings. His collection of decorative arts was equally expansive; an eighteenth-century mantel clock from his collection is now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (inv. no. 73.DB.78).