Seascape with Ships

This is one of Jan van de Cappelle's larger pictures, nearly 90 by 114 centimetres, painted around 1660. Groups of vessels of different kinds lie together on open water under a silvery-grey sky, and on board the sailors are busy with cargo, smoking pipes or talking across to the next boat. He kept to a narrow range of colour, cool greys for the sea and sky and warm browns for the hulls.

He painted it on wooden panel, and at some point it was transferred to canvas, a treatment restorers once used when the wood of a picture was giving way.

For about 90 years it belonged to the Mills family, London bankers who became the Barons Hillingdon. They acquired it through the dealer Colnaghi after an 1888 auction and sold it at Christie's in 1979. When it came on the market again, the Mauritshuis described it as the finest seascape by Van de Cappelle still in private hands, and buying it in 2007 took a long list of backers, from the Dutch charity lottery VriendenLoterij to the Rembrandt Association and the museum's own Friends.