https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Storm_on_the_Sea_of_Galilee
This painting has always confused me, but I've never come across any art historical discussion that shares my confusion. Is this a obscure kind of boat, or is it partially shipwrecked, or what?
At first glance, it looks like the front of the boat is to the lower-left and the back is to the lower-right, as there are little pointed prow-like ends there. But no, the mast is off to one side, in the top-left. So apparently the back half of the boat is a sort of semi-circular design, then there's this irregular bit that sticks out in front, where the mast is. But the front looks almost unfinished, more like rocks than the front of a boat. The overall design seems roughly triangular, with those pointed bits sticking off to the side. And the mast still looks off-center to me.
Here's one observer who thinks those are rocks, and not even part of the boat at all: "We almost can’t tell the waves from the rocks against which the small vessel seems about to founder." https://www.wbur.org/lastseen/2018/09/15/christ-in-the-storm-on-the-sea-of-galilee
Here's a drawing in the Wellcome Collection, based on the painting, where the boat can be seen a little more clearly, and it looks more boaty and less rocky, but still very odd: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/u3etf9s9
Were there ever boats that looked like that, in seventeenth century Netherlands or even ancient Roman Palestine? Or is this more like the medieval drawings of elephants--an example of artists distorting or misrepresenting reality? But it's hard for me to imagine that Rembrandt would create such an implausible boat, and equally hard to imagine such a boat actually existing. Can anyone find a picture somewhere of a boat that looked like that?
I've been googling this and found nothing, so I wanted there to be at least some record on the internet of someone asking this question.
In Rembrandt's painting, what you are looking at is a very distorted version of a Zuider Zee hoeker, roughly contemporary to Rembrandt's time. It was a small single-mast fishing boat, similar to this, with a broad, rounded stern and a square main sail. Imagine the linked image, but much smaller, with the same dimensions. You are right that Rembrandt, because he is a painter and not a fisherman, has distorted the ship for his own purposes. The length of his ship is severely shortened compared to the apparent breadth of the stern, giving us a stumpy, fat-bottomed girl. The diameter of the mast is impossibly huge and the mast is pushed back towards the stern so that he can keep the boat centered, but also have the nice prominent diagonal compositional element in frame. The rigging, as painted, seems to be a mix of ship types and would never work for an actual boat of this type. The most prominent, the flying stay at top right, could not possibly have broken free from its ties in that way. The sailors have done things to the sail, boom, and heading of the boat which are quite the opposite of what they should have done, and struggle still to do.
For a "correct" one, see Simon de Vlieger's version, with all the proportions and riggings done right. Sorry about the image quality, but that painting is hard to find online. Here you can see that for all its nautical correctness, it is not nearly as dynamic as Rembrandt's effort. [edit: if anyone can find a better image of de Vlieger's, or one of the other versions of this same scene, let me know! I am unable to log in to artstor at all, and wonder if their servers are temporarily down due to the pandemic?]
What contemporaries thought of Rembrandt's boat is unclear. The painting was, obviously, widely praised, but one wonders how many fisherman were viewing it. Even today, as you have discovered, the elements of the painting relevant and interesting to art historians rarely coincide with its technical accuracy.
For others reading, a fun (or not-so-fun) fact: this painting, along with twelve others, was stolen from the Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. None have ever been recovered. Read about the theft and the lost works here.
John Walsh wrote a piece about Rembrandt's boat selection, and general experience with painting seascapes (this was his first!), in Source: notes on the history of art 5.1 (1985). He goes into more detail about how the rigging is incorrect, and also does a lot of work on the background and probable inspirations for Rembrandt's effort.
edited to fix a million typos
