Anvers

This image’s striking resemblance to Apostool’s prints after seventeenth-century harbor scenes reminds us that Jongkind was thoroughly steeped in his native country’s pictorial tradition. However, the reflection of the rising or setting sun on the water’s surface, an effect absent in the earlier harbor views of Apostool, prefigures the concerns of Claude Monet and other French Impressionists. Jongkind was to make his name primarily as a link between Holland and France in the mid-nineteenth century, a moment when critical rediscovery of Dutch art was converging with new naturalistic tendencies in landscape painting. Although Jongkind settled in Paris after being sent there to study art, he frequently returned to making Dutch landscape views, whose popularity at that time ensured a source of ready income.