Paul Jean Clays

Paul Jean Clays was a Belgian marine painter who painted rivers, estuaries and harbours with fresh, clear colour. His ships sit on calm water under wide skies, and he painted what he saw rather than following the old conventions of marine painting.

He was born in Bruges in 1819 and studied under the French marine painter Théodore Gudin. He lived in Antwerp in the early 1850s and then in Brussels from 1856. By the 1860s critics counted him among the best marine painters of his time. He favoured the Scheldt, the Dutch waterways and the Belgian coast. The National Gallery in London holds Dutch Boats in the Flushing Roads, and the Metropolitan Museum has his Festival of the Freedom of the Scheldt at Antwerp in 1863. He received the Order of Leopold and the Legion of Honour, and died in Brussels in 1900.

In Shipping in a Calm, look at the reflections and the pale, even light.