Apart from rowing boats this parade features (reading from left to right): a herring buss; a hoeker partly concealed by a kaag; a states yacht; two smalschepen, the second nearer one partly concealing another hoeker. Slightly more than in the earlier painting in the Royal Collection, van de Velde has used a smooth grey-blue paint layer to suggest a heat haze, an effect reinforced by the artist exploiting the flatness of any marine image rounded off at top and bottom by sky and its reflection.

Constantijn Huygens wrote in his autobiography of c.1630 about landscape painters, including Esaias van de Velde, whose work is so natural that ‘nothing is lacking except the warmth of the sun and the movement caused by the gentle breeze’. This awareness of what painters can’t paint – everything apprehended by smelling, feeling and hearing – is almost a cliché of writers about landscape, which is especially relevant in images such as this where silence and stillness reign. Calms often include a distant cannon’s salute, perhaps to suggest sound, perhaps to suggest that silence which in reality accompanies the cannon’s smoke before the sound reaches our ears. In this case the artist includes a bargeman in livery blowing a ceremonial trumpet, which certainly shatters the quiet but which also make us think about sound in general and start to imagine the creaking of the sails and lapping of the waves.

Signed and dated lower left: 'W. v.Velde 1659'