Ships in a Gale on the IJ before the City of Amsterdam

The IJ was Amsterdam's door to the world, the broad water in front of the city where ships of every size came and went. Here Bakhuizen packs it with traffic in a stiff wind, from small fishing boats to armed ocean-going ships, with the city low on the horizon behind a forest of masts. The sun breaks through moving clouds and lays patches of light across the choppy water, picking out one vessel after another. He dated the canvas 1666. Its later life was quiet. By 1801 it belonged to George Craufurd, a collector in Rotterdam, and in 1806 Sir Matthew White Ridley bought it in London for 60 guineas. It stayed with the Ridleys for well over a century, at Blagdon Hall in Northumberland, until it was sold at Christie's in 1933 for about 50 pounds. Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, collectors in Marblehead, Massachusetts, bought it in 1995, and in 2017 it was among the Dutch and Flemish paintings they gave the Museum of Fine Arts, the year the museum opened its Center for Netherlandish Art.