Fishing Pinks in Breaking Waves

The beach at Scheveningen comes alive in this 1880 painting by Hendrik Willem Mesdag, a Dutch artist who spent much of his life near this fishing village outside The Hague. Broad, flat-bottomed boats called pinks sit in the churning shallows, their tall masts decorated with small flags that flutter in the wind. Fishermen and women crowd the sand around wooden baskets, sorting and selling whatever the sea gave them that day. A vast expanse of silvery grey clouds fills the upper half of the canvas, giving the whole scene a cool, damp, oceanic mood.

Mesdag painted in the manner of the Hague School, a circle of Dutch artists in the late 1800s who favored quiet coastal and country scenes rendered in soft, muted tones. His own path to painting was an unusual one. He worked in banking for years before switching careers in his thirties to pursue art full time, and the sea became the great subject of his life. So often did he return to the North Sea that people came to call him its painter. His affection for the hardworking villagers and the restless water they relied on runs through every brushstroke here.