The Breakwater

This is the largest sea piece Jacob van Ruisdael painted, and most of it is weather. A gale drives brown surf against a wooden breakwater, a line of piles guarding a strip of shore with a cottage and trees, while ships ride it out behind. He made it in the early 1670s. An agent bought it for Louis XVI at an Amsterdam sale in 1783, and when the Louvre opened to the public ten years later, the painter and dealer Jean-Baptiste Pierre Lebrun judged it badly repainted. The 19th century saw it differently. The historian Jules Michelet admired it, and so did Vincent van Gogh. Turner made drawings after it that are now in the British Museum, and Eugène Boudin painted a copy that is now in Le Havre.