View from the Coast of Norway or A Stormy Sea Near the Coast

This painting carries on the tradition of seascapes started by Jan Porcellis and Simon de Vlieger, the first artists in this genre to relegate external elements to nature to a minor role of importance. Ruisdael painted between forty and fifty seascape views, of which around thirty still exist.
Less questionable, however, is the influence that Allaert van Everdingen had on Ruisdael, this painting revealing obvious affinities with Storm in a Rocky Coast (Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt), executed by this artist in the mid-1640s. The title of this work – View from the Coast of Norway – dates from its incorporation into the Gulbenkian Collection, and may result from the inspiration the artist found in compositions by Everdingen, who visited Scandinavia. Ruisdael also executed two other similar paintings of rocky coasts (private collection, New York and Nationalmuseum, Stockholm).
As in most of his paintings, two thirds of the composition is occupied by the menacing sky, a factor which gives the scene great dramatic force. The boats battered by great gusts of wind and the brutal smashing of the waves on the slightly unrealistic rocks are distributed throughout the composition in the aim of reinforcing the atmospheric violence of the scene.