This is a typical monochrome seascape by the Haarlem painter Pieter Mulier the Elder: shipping in stormy waters under a vast clouded sky.

 

 

Dutch painter

Haarlem circa 1600/1615 – 1659 Haarlem

 

Pieter was born into a family of Flemish cloth-weavers, Protestant refugees who, as so many others, had come to Haarlem.

Until recently it was thought that he died in Haarlem in 1670, but apparently this was another person carrying the same name.

 

Marine painter.

He specialised in seascapes with shipping on choppy waters under a vast, often clouded or misty sky.

 

Funny enough his artistic production can be divided into 2 types, those with and those without a small rowing boat with a fisherman pulling in his net on the foreground.

 

Nothing is known about Mulier’s artistic training. According to L.J. Bol he trained under Simon de Vlieger in Rotterdam.

His marine paintings with silver-grey and brown tonalities remind of Simon de Vlieger, Jan Porcellis, Jan van Goyen and of Abraham van Beyeren.

 

There are not that many details known about Pieter’s life.

He got married in 1635 and the couple had at least two children.

He entered the guild of Saint Luke in Haarlem in 1638.

Among his pupils ranks his son Pieter the younger and Frans de Hulst.

In 1647 he is recorded in Amsterdam, where he was a member of the Mennonite community.

Between 1652 and 1658 he is again recorded in Haarlem. He died in Haarlem in May 1659.

In the last years of his life he is known to have accumulated substantial personal debts as a result of excessive drinking.

 

His son and pupil, Pieter Mulier the younger (1637 – 1701), nicknamed " Cavalier Pietro Tempesta", was a dramatic marine and landscape painter active in Italy, where he spent eight years in jail, in Genoa, accused of a murdering his own wife.

 

 

This is clearly a small gem by Mulier: under a vast sky a “smalschip” is fighting to escape from foundering onto a fiercely illuminated rocky coast. But long waves at left preview already the dramatic ending of this hopeless adventure.

Al these fresh colours came from under a thick, brown layer of varnish.

 

 

Because it is such a dynamic maritime scene, set under a typical Dutch, vast sky.