This early 20th-century oil painting by Scottish artist James Kay RSW (1858-1942) depicts a busy harbour scene at Antwerp.

There's something about James Kay's harbour scenes that seems to convey not only the sights, but also the sounds of a place. Boats appear to knock gently against their moorings, water laps against timber, funnels breathe smoke into the air and, somewhere beyond the picture, one imagines the continuing clatter of a working port. Yet here, as the title Close of a Peaceful Day suggests, the noise is beginning to subside.

Painted at Antwerp, the view places a substantial steam vessel at its centre, surrounded by the smaller sailing craft and working boats that animated the city's waterways. In the foreground, figures linger beside a moored boat while across the water masts, funnels and the spires of the city rise into an extraordinary sky. Smoke pours from the steamer and becomes almost indistinguishable from the clouds above it.

Kay had travelled to Belgium to find his subject, but he understood this world instinctively. Raised at Lamlash on the Isle of Arran as the son of a Royal Navy man, and later celebrated for his paintings of Glasgow and the Clyde, he had spent much of his life looking at ports. He knew their peculiar mixture of movement and stillness: enormous vessels temporarily at rest, water forever shifting beneath them, smoke carried away on the wind and small human figures moving among machines.

It's this sense of movement that makes the painting particularly compelling. Kay has little interest in describing every component of the steamer with mechanical precision. Instead, forms are constructed through vigorous passages of colour. Rust, ochre, black, cream, blue and flashes of red jostle together across the harbour, while the water fractures them again into restless reflections. Even Antwerp itself seems to flicker in and out of definition.

Above everything is the sky. Broad, broken strokes of cream, blue, orange and grey sweep across the upper half of the composition, carrying the smoke with them. Kay was painting modern industry, but he approached it with the sensitivity of a landscape painter.

This picture was exhibited at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts in 1915, as catalogue number 230. Its title seems especially evocative in that year. There's no need to impose a wartime narrative upon the scene, but the idea of a peaceful day inevitably carried a particular resonance in Europe during the First World War.

Signed in the lower left and held in a substantial carved wooden frame.

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Medium: Oil on panel
Overall size: 29½” x 25” / 74.5cm x 60cm
Year of creation: 1915
Labels & Inscriptions: Exhibition label on the reverse.
Provenance: Private collection, UK.
Exhibited: Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, 1915, no. 230.
Condition: Overall very good. Frame with various marks and showing its age.
Artist’s auction maximum: £22,000 achieved in 2003 for ‘Rue Saint Romain, Rouen’.
Our reference: BRV2347