ABRAHAM STORCK | A southern port scene with numerous figures on a quayside

S. Burton-Jones, London, 1936 (according to an annotated mount at the Witt Library, London);

A. Gifford Scott;

By whose Executors sold, London, Sotheby's, 22 Febuary 1984, lot 50, for £48,000.

C. Gully, 'Abraham Storck's Italian Paintings', in Antique Collector, September 1989, pp. 70–75, reproduced fig. 1.

This bustling harbour scene, alive with the day-to-day goings-on of a busy trade port, seems likely to have been painted by Storck in the 1680s or '90s. By that time, following the end of their war with Spain in 1648, the Dutch dominated trade throughout Europe, Asia and North America; they had the largest merchant fleet in Europe and an average of nearly a thousand Dutch ships entered the Baltic Sea each year.