A Dutch three-master is riding close-hauled off what appears to be a dune landscape. It is followed by a small gaff-rigged boat with a leeboard and further on the right in the middle ground a square-sterned ship with half its sails set is heading towards the viewer. Between them is a flute and in the background more three-masters can be seen. It is not clear whether the large vessel in the foreground is a merchantman or a man-of-war convoying merchant fleets. De Beer detected the influence of Reinier Nooms in the colourful and linearly rendered three-master in the foreground of this painting by Jacob Gerritsz Loef.5 Since that artist made most of his pictures in the 1650s that would be the earliest decade for the present work. The slender and thus later type of ship with a lower stern does not contradict that date. The dendrochronology is also consistent with an origin in the 1650s, since it shows that the support was most likely ready for use by 1652. Interestingly, there is a literal repetition of this vessel on a slightly smaller scale in a panel by Loef of roughly the same size.6 This sort of close reuse of motifs by marine artists has been noted before in the case of a few who specialized in pen paintings, such as Experiens Sillemans,7 Willem van de Velde I and Heerman Witmont.8 However, Loef did so on several occasions as well. A three-master with all its sails reefed except the fore one features in two of his seascapes.9 Moreover, in two works in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, which were probably conceived as a pair, there is an almost identical ship. It is up against the left edge in the one picture and is repeated in the centre of the putative companion piece.10 More such examples are common in Loef’s oeuvre. Eddy Schavemaker, 2022 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements