Abraham Storck

1644–1708, Amsterdam

The painter, draftsman, and etcher Abraham Storck (his real name was Sturckenburch) was the youngest and best-known member of an Amsterdam family of artists. Storck was a ­versatile and productive painter of seascapes and a member of the Amsterdam painters’ guild. The abundant output of his workshop during the last three decades of the seventeenth ­century reflects the huge demand for Dutch and Mediterranean seascapes, coastal landscapes, and harbor scenes during this period, resulting in the employment of many workshop ­assistants. The best of Storck’s richly detailed seascapes, –embellished with carefully chosen staffage figures, point to the influence of Willem van de Velde the Younger, while his ­depictions of sea battles and winter landscapes are clearly ­inspired by the work of Jan Abrahamsz. Beerstraten. The ­powerful silhouettes of the large sailing ships are a compositional topos and are also reminiscent of the paintings of Storck’s contemporary Ludolf Backhuysen. Abraham Storck’s drawn oeuvre is fairly large. Many of his sheets are not preparatory to paintings but stand as ­independent works of art.