Boat at Sunset

In his History of Painting, Alexander Benois gave a separate high assessment of Adam Pynacker, calling him the most “Italian Dutchman”. After Pynacker spent three years in Italy, studying painting and travelling around, his works acquired some distinctive features that do indeed mean that they can be confused with Italian landscapists when people are making attributions. Pynacker’s palette, however, does nonetheless display a truly Dutch range of ochre-grey hues that artists could not have seen or produced beneath an Italian sun. Pynacker was particularly skilled at reproducing the lighting effects of late evening, when fluffy clouds pile up against a background of a golden sunset, while down below buildings can still be made out as a dark, yet limpid mass.
In Boat at Sunset, the artist managed to convey with one and the same tone both the still clear, light sky and the already cool steely surface of the calm river. In the foreground, he depicted an episode typical for Holland – men getting things ashore after a successful day’s trading. The barrels are being untied and gangplanks are about to be extended. Tomorrow peasants will arrive with their carts bringing fresh wares that will be loaded in the same containers. Salted meat, butter, honey, alcoholic infusions, wax, drying oil, fruit and vegetables – everything the rich countryside could supply found its way to the stores and stalls of the major commercial cities. Adam Pynacker was able to rethink this humble genre scene and turn it into a majestic landscape imbued with the poetry of the waning day.