Shoreline with Basket and Boats, 1876

William Frederick de Haas’s coastal scenes put forward a pictorial language of serenity, silence, and solitude. Born in Holland, de Haas studied at The Hague and moved to the United States at the age of twenty-four. Armed with the precepts of Dutch painting, he turned his attention to the American coast. He worked in New York’s Tenth Street Studio Building alongside his brother Mauritz, his fellow Dutchman Kruseman Van Elten, and the leading artists of the Hudson River School, and became one of the nineteenth century’s few marine specialists. His expansive scenes of Maine, Long Island, and Newfoundland provide an