The Gallery recently acquired a large work by the major Dutch painter of seascapes Simon de Vlieger(ca. 1601–1653), titled Fisherfolk and Other Figures on a Beach (1642). It depicts a view from the beach toward the sea under an atmospheric sky freighted with towering clouds. But what else might the picture offer, beyond its melting beauty and convincing illusion of deep space?

This fall, John Walsh, B.A. 1961, Director Emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, returns to Yale to examine the picture and what its original audience would have seen in it. Walsh looks back at the tradition of beach views upon which de Vlieger drew and traces the development of atmospheric effects in Dutch painting of the period. He identifies the sailing maneuvers of the boats and the activities of the fishermen and their clients on the shore. Walsh connects references to prosperity that the artist embedded in the composition with the widermaritime commerce of the Dutch and with their concepts of virtue and its reward.

In de Vlieger’s time, beaches were for work and profit, not for play. Walsh ends with a brief look at how images of the beach evolved—as a place for mystical encounters in works by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) and Edvard Munch (1863–1944), for bourgeois leisure-time activities in Impressionist pictures, and for the nearly abstract visions of the young Piet Mondrian (1872–1944).

The lecture will be released on YouTube on Wednesday, September 29, at 12:30 pm EDT. On the following Friday, October 1, at 12:30 pm EDT, Walsh will be joined on Zoom by Jessie Park, the Nina and Lee Griggs Assistant Curator of European Art, for a live conversation reflecting on the lecture. Generously sponsored by the Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund.

Closed captions will be available in English.

Registration is required only for the conversation; register at https://bit.ly/3ALbEEK. All those who register for the conversation will receive an emailed link when the lecture becomes available.