This engraving belongs to a series of eleven prints known as the Sailing Vessels, executed by Frans Huys after lost designs by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The series displays a wide range of sailing vessels, including merchantmen and warships, large seagoing vessels and small coasters, galleys, and caravels. The detail and painstaking accuracy with which the vessels are rendered attests to the artist’s great care and leaves no doubt that Bruegel must have prepared for the series by making numerous sketches and elaborate studies. However, none of the preparatory drawing for this series survived, nor any of the study sketches that Bruegel must have made prior to the final designs.

It is unclear when Bruegel became interested in boats, but the dependency and pride the citizens of Antwerp took in shipping is understandable, given the nature of the city’s economy. As a mercantile superpower with direct access to the North Sea and as home to some of the most ambitious traders and explorers in Europe, Antwerp took great pride in the prowess and engineering of their ships and in their connection to the sea. Whatever the precise source of their appeal, Bruegel’s series of Sailing Vessels was a highly sophisticated creation that far surpassed previous examples of the genre in technique and imagination.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a Netherlandish Renaissance painter and printmaker from Breda, in the province Brabant, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes. He was an apprentice of Pieter Coecke van Aelst, whose daughter Mayken he married. He spent some time in France and Italy, and then settled in Antwerp, where in 1551 he was accepted as a master in the painter’s guild. He traveled to Italy soon after, and returned to Antwerp before settling in Brussels permanently ten years later.

Most of the plates were engraved by Frans Huys, shortly before his death in 1562. Huys may have left two from the series unfinished at his death. The 1565 date on this plate probably indicates the year in which the series was published by Hieronymus Cock.