Estuary at Day's End

Simon de Vlieger

National Gallery of Art

Clouds surge across a steel-blue sky over a gently rippling body of water in this horizontal landscape painting. The horizon comes a quarter of the way up the composition and the water in the bottom quarter is painted with shades of slate blue and gray with pearl-white highlights where the low sun skims across the surface. A rowboat to the left is piled with barrels and six men. A masted sailboat is moored on a sandbar to the right, leaning sharply away from us as three men tend to the hull. Dark gray smoke billows from a flickering orange flame under a long-legged pot farther back on the sandbar. A pier-like structure constructed with thick, weathered logs juts out of the water along the right edge of the composition. One long pole with a barrel impaled on the end reaches more than halfway up the painting. White smoke curls around a three-masted ship farther out in the water, beyond the sandbar, and at least nine sails dot the distant horizon to the left. Sunlight streaks vertically from behind a screen of clouds in the top left corner of the composition, and puffy, pale gray clouds pile against a pale blue sky in the right two-thirds of the painting.