Pieter the Elder Mulier

1610 – 1670

Dutch marine painter. He trained under Simon de Vlieger in Rotterdam and worked under the influence of Jan Porcellis. He entered the Guild of St Luke in Haarlem in 1638. In 1647 he is recorded in Amsterdam. A later record confirms a delivery of beer to his Haarlem address in exchange for paintings. He painted seascapes with shipping on choppy waters under a vast, misty sky (Bredius Museum, The Hague). This type of painting must have proved popular with his clients for he resorted to the same composition over and over again. He typically used dark waves in the foreground to push the scene back and enhance the sense of depth; a tilted sailing vessel to close the composition from the left; and a small fishing boat with a figure of the fisherman hauling a net as a central feature of almost all paintings. He signed his works but did not date them and this makes their chronology difficult to establish. Although a fine painter, his fame was short-lived. Houbraken, an important early 18th-century source on art, confused him with the landscape painter Pieter Molyn, and his seascapes appearing on the art market more recently have been attributed to other artists. His son and a pupil, Pieter Mulier the Younger, nicknamed 'Pietro Tempesta', was a dramatic marine artist active in Italy, where he spent 16 years in jail accused of a murder.

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