An unrigged fishing boat, with one man still aboard, lies in starboard-bow view on a mudflat. The leeboard of the boat is visible. Three other men are variously occupied close by. The man, on the far left, is stooping to gather mussels that he will place in his basket. In the central foreground a man wearing a red cap and gloves holds a shallow basket full of fish in his right hand and tows a plank behind him with his left. He is heading towards the boat. The third man, standing next to the boat, lifts a full basket of shell-fish while his spade stands in the mud next to him. In the shallow water in the foreground to the right, a man in a red hat sits in a shallop, rowing two other men towards the mudflat. In the background, on the far left of the painting, a sailing vessel and a larger ship can be seen. The stillness of the water emphasises the calm of the scene.

Jan Porcellis has long enjoyed the reputation established for him by the seventeenth century artist and author Samuel van Hoogstraten, who hailed him as ‘the great Raphael of sea painting’. The son of a Flemish Protestant captain, Porcellis was probably born around 1584 in the city of Ghent. Where – and with whom – he trained remains unknown. Although Houbraken asserted that he was apprenticed in Haarlem to Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom. A lack of documentary evidence surrounding Porcellis’ early work, coupled with a distinct incongruity between the works of the two artists, has made this statement difficult to substantiate. Porcellis is likely to have lived and worked in both London and Rotterdam during the early seventeenth century, before leaving to find greater professional success in Antwerp. He entered the Antwerp Guild of St Luke in 1617. In 1622, the widowed Porcellis and his three children moved to Haarlem, where the artist swiftly remarried, this time to Janneke Flessiers, the daughter of a prominent publisher. For Porcellis, moving to Haarlem provided the opportunity to work in the same artistic milieu as Vroom, van Wieringen and Verbeeck. These artists, and others, had been responsible for a new visual vocabulary which had evolved in the city and permeated landscape painting from around 1612. Paintings were increasingly pared-down, depicting humble subjects, with views of the shore particularly widespread. One such work is this image of 'Mussel Fishing', produced during Porcellis’ first year in Haarlem. His depiction of relatively large-scale figures, reinforced by the low viewpoint, results in a painting in which these industrious mussel pickers – the most proletarian of all coastal labourers – are endowed with considerable humanity.

Porcellis produced a number of ‘beachscapes’ during his first year in Haarlem, including several studies of fishermen at work, such as the contemporary sketch of a 'Man Bending to Lift a Basket' in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg. The similarity between the sturdy, crouched figure in the sketch and the man drawing mussels into his basket on the far left of the present painting has led Walsh to conclude that the sketch is a preparatory drawing for this painting. Almost the entire surface of the painting is suffused with a glacial, bleached-out expanse of white, which effectively describes both the flat, shallow water and the broad, cloud-filled sky. Calm, austere and serene, the focus of the scene is on the undisturbed water which moves only where the rowing boat and its oars briefly break the surface. The composition, depicting a pallid sky seeping into an equally pale sea, has been described as ‘modest, plain . . . exploiting the flat horizon . . . it is the ancestor of a type of seascape that became hugely popular in the hands of van de Cappelle, Dubbels and Willem van de Velde the Younger.’ Thus the painting attests to Porcellis’ transition from a disciple of Vroom, concerned with the depictions of melodramatic battles, to an independent artist preoccupied with showing anonymous tracts of shoreline and unspecified expanses of open sea. Porcellis became an immensely successful painter, whose wise investments included several properties in the town of Zoeterwoude. His final pictures were painted in 1631 and he died in January 1632. The painting is signed and dated 'IP 1622' on the plank, lower left.