Ships off a Rocky Coast

The castle on the clifftop at the right of this seascape stood on no coast at all. It is the Hradčany, the royal castle of Prague, and Adam Willaerts took it from a drawing by Roelant Savery, a Flemish-born painter who had worked for Emperor Rudolf II in Prague before settling in Utrecht. Willaerts said in 1622 that he visited Savery every day, and the fortress in the painting matches the size of the one in Savery's drawing. Most Dutch viewers would not have known it was Prague.

Willaerts signed and dated the panel 1621 on a boulder in the foreground. A year earlier Frederick V, the Elector Palatine who had briefly been King of Bohemia, had fled Prague for the Dutch Republic with his queen, and one scholar has suggested the picture was painted for someone in their circle. The Rijksmuseum owns it and has lent it to the Mauritshuis since 2000, which shows it in the Gallery Prince Willem V in The Hague. Down on the shore, fishermen bring in their catch and a woman sells fish.