Jan van de Cappelle

[2] He lived all his life in Amsterdam, and as well as working as an artist spent much, or most,[3] of his time helping to manage his father Franchoy's large dyeworks, which specialized in the expensive dye carmine, and which he eventually inherited in 1674.

His marine paintings usually show estuary or river scenes rather than the open sea, and the water is always very calm, allowing it to act as a mirror reflecting the cloud formations above; this effect was Cappelle's speciality.

Van de Cappelle was a very wealthy man who never needed to rely on his painting for his livelihood,[2] and it is not known if he joined the city's Guild of Saint Luke, or the separate "brotherhood of painters" founded in 1653.

Abraham Bredius suggested Van de Cappelle was a friend of Rembrandt,[7] at whose insolvency sales in 1656 and 1658 he was a large buyer, and who painted portraits of him and his wife.

[14] The majority of his works are marine or river views, nearly always with several vessels, but he also left a number of small winter landscapes somewhat in the manner of Aert van der Neer;[18] these all seem to date between 1652 and 1654.

Van de Cappelle painted many parade marine subjects, depicting "a formal gathering of ships for a ceremonial occasion".

[2] Other paintings, mostly smaller and of less busy subjects, a type often called "calms", show "an all-pervading luminous atmosphere that softens all outlines and unifies forms and local colours",[2] or as Kenneth Clark puts it, "When sky was reflected on water, there was achieved that unity of luminous atmosphere which is ... the whole point of van de Capelle and van de Velde".

[22] In his early works he followed the muted palette of the "tonal school", but enlived with local highlights of bright colour, but moved in his later works to "a warmer golden tonality, exceptionally allowing himself a greater colouristic exuberance when setting the rosy glow of a sunset sky against water of a deep turquoise blue, as in the River Scene with Sailing Vessels (Rotterdam, Boymans–van Beuningen Museum)".

[2] According to his leading scholar, Margarita Russell, "More than any other artist of his time, with the exception only of Rembrandt, van de Cappelle was a painter of light".

This was also probably partly the result of the biographers' following contemporary prejudices against marine, landscape, and still life painting, regarded as the lowest in the hierarchy of genres.