Soon it will be dark. When, then? When will we be taken onboard? Such is probably what this family wonders in the bottom-left corner of the painting. Sitting on their luggage, the maiden listens to her fiancé playing the luth, while the wife holds her child struck by the shrieks of seagulls gliding across the salty breeze. It is nearly sunset and the lady’s husband with the maiden’s brother, standing closer to the shore, are still negotiating the fare with this Turk, identified by his turban. Unless, to spend time, they are buying a pipe from those the Muslim carries in his shoulder bag. Either way, they would not be waiting on the beach with a pile of trunks and their stranded family if they were not hoping to embark before dark. Meanwhile, the child feels safe in his mother’s arm, despite the brawl taking place further to the right, in the middle of the picture. Two hatted officers are about to intervene, the red-caped one unsheathing his sword to enforce order. Behind them, a young man shields his eyes from the bright sun with his hat. Pointing at a man facing him on a bark, he is possibly enquiring about being ferried onto one of the large ships anchored to the far right.

Those ships are connected, literally, to the far left of the picture. If we follow the thick ropes falling from the left-facing prow, we find the end of one emerging from the water at the far-left end of the shore, where a bent sailor is tying it around a mooring post. The immersed rope draws a curve subtly separating the human characters on the beach from the action taking place on the water. The curve pattern extends further to the left behind the half-kneeling man, as delineated by the neat circular line between water and sand. Further back, the smaller boats and the quay in cut stone narrow the perspective, in symmetry with the two large ships to the right, on the opposite side of the painting. The overall impression conveyed is therefore that of a vast round liquid stage, a nearly closed watery platform around which the characters on the shore and quays are disseminated like an audience watching some performance.

What spectacle are they attending? Time. The passing of time is the show taking place. Unbeknownst to many, the spectators are part of the show―whose star is none other than the sun itself. See how the setting star upon the horizon, casting its golden rays all across the waters and unto the shore and eyes of the characters, brings life to the entire scene. It feels as if its dazzling ray mirrored upon the waves was the hand of a clock slowly moving across the liquid circle, or indeed like the gnomon, that pointy bit of a sundial that casts the shadow. The entire harbour can be read as a metaphor of the passing of time. This suggestion is corroborated by the actual clock displayed on the pinnacle of the main building to the far-left. At first sight it seemed inconspicuous, merely showing as one among many architectural items in Claude’s palatial phantasy, a feast for our eyes! We were so much taken in by the skilful succession of surprises, from the majestic balcony and monumental columns of the first building to the elegant four stone pavilions crowning the mansion behind (like a Blenheim Palace-on-Sea), across a side wharf and steps, to this vertiginous and thin lighthouse in the middle (how do they manage to carry wood up to that lantern on the top?), concluding with the face-to-face of the two larger towers closing the harbour on either side―that we nearly missed that clock. The perspective distorts its round shape into an ellipse. But we can read its numbers still, spaced out all around the circumference of the dial whose long hand shows 6:10pm. Above it, a smaller disc appears, framed in stone: probably the coat of arms of the family owning that mansion. Visually, their juxtaposition merely looks a smaller circle overhanging a wider one. The smaller one above shows neither hand nor figures, but the larger one below does. Does it perhaps remind us of a similar configuration? Can we identify on the painting another smaller disc, clear of any hand or figures, echoed by a much larger disc below it, that one equipped with a long hand and surrounded with many figures indeed?

Yes, so does the setting sun look above the vast ellipse of the beach. We recall the sunray reaching successively the various characters watching on the sand like numerical figures on the circumference of a dial. Well, what a stunning perspective this analogy of shapes offers… Could it be refined through additional similarities? If the architectural dial of stone and metal projects meaning unto the natural dial of water and light, could it be that stone figures surround the former, as human ones do the latter? Right at the top indeed, their little legs dangling in the air, two statues of children sit on either side of the smaller disc (the coat of arms), right above the larger disc (the actual clock). The legs intersect the conspicuous stone coving like amidst the harbour a ship does the horizon, connecting sun and sea. In a vertical niche to the left of the clock, a tall statue stands, probably a pagan deity such as Minerva, her head covered with a helmet. Right above her, several smaller characters show within a square frame. Similarly, carved reliefs of children at play are displayed on the balustrade along the terrace. At the bottom left, that is, at ground level, another gigantic statue, three times larger than life, stands in a niche. Thus, we now realise, a semi-circle of stone figures surrounds the clock: above, left and below it. They echo the natural sundial, and prepare us to recognise that all in this painting gravitates around the sun.

That sun is God, symbolically, who once whispered about human hearts: I will draw them with the cords of Adam, with the bands of love (Hos 11:4). Designing every creature, great and small, as a fragmentary reflection of his infinite perfections, God created the material universe as a love letter to men. Claude’s Seaport by Sunset depicts the beauty of God’s creation (expansive sky, sun, sea), to which man harmoniously collaborates (building harbours, mansions, ships). Since ports are by definition places of passage, this painting also evokes the passing of time, the meaning of human activity, and the prospect of eternity. The faraway destination where our stranded family, down there in the bottom-left corner of the oval beach, expects to be ferried, is the afterlife. Every spectator can identify with them, as with all other figures scattered along our existential sundial. Like the hand of a luminous clock, the sunray slowly moves across the turquoise waves, down from the gilded horizon, unto the shore where it reaches its human beholder: maiden, lad, mother, child, father, merchant, rogue, official, rich and poor, old and young, Christian and heathen.

Symbolically again, here light means grace: that gratuitous sharing in his very life offered by God to rational creatures, men and angels. On this picture, light suffuses every tower and window, every ripple and cloud, every bird and human. None but the latter, though, are endowed with a soul enabling them to understand and welcome divine grace. It takes reflecting on this visitation of our mind’s eyes by the divine sun. Will we turn our back on it, like the maiden enthralled by the tunes of a serenade? Will we merely keep it in the background, like the mother anxious to find out when her boat will carry her to safety with her child, securing for her progeny a bright future on earth? Behind the edge of the dark gentleman’s black hat, will we shield our eyes from it as if dazzled by the truth? Or like the gentleman bargaining with the Turk, will we ignore it, the better to go about our business, betting that our silver coins will retain currency once, across the sea, we will have disembarked? Like the officer unsheathing his sword, will we readily account for our daily use under the sun of the authority entrusted to us in the service of the community? Or finally, like the lowly seamen to the right, working hard under the scorching glare to ferry barrels of precious liquor, a single pint of which is worth one month of their wages, will we declare ourselves too busy, tired and deprived to give thanks for such light? Grace comes to us all in the course of our lives. The question is: will we care to respond?

No priest stands on that symbolic bank of life’s reckoning, did you notice?―no professed atheist or enlightened liberal either. Those came long after Claude in his turn had crossed the sea and bathed in the Sun of Justice, Christ the Lord. While Claude painted such Seaports by Sunset, in the seventeenth century, man sinned and yet, none had drunk so much liquor as to proclaim, There is no sun! The masters of suspicion had not yet persuaded the world of God’s death, of man’s amorality and of the imposture of harbours. Not yet had evolution melted our kneecaps, forbidding genuflections before our Maker, Saviour and Judge. Not yet had man started drifting away, like a drunken boat, from the safe shores of virtue. Not yet had we been grounded, forbidden heaven, lured into fishtraps they called harbours, fatal havens where all should swarm and dwell but which none may ever leave alive, whence no man was ever to spring, fly and seek alien coves, delusory heavens―they taught.

We came after. No wonder it is more difficult for us to read a painting like this one. It speaks of life, truth, grace and light, none of which carries a price tag. We simply don’t know what to make of it. We wonder whether the subtle network of signification hinted at truly conveys as much meaning, or even more, than our optic fibres and our plasma screens. Stemming from the ship decks, can the numerous masts stand as so many antennas, intercepting communications of vital interest and translating energy into intelligible truths? Flowing from the gilded horizon, are those turquoise waves electromagnetic, carrying to shore critical signals? Along the stately quay, do the imposing towers, the triumphant lighthouse and the reliable clock vibrate, unseen by untrained eyes, like potent reflectors of messages from yonder eternal?

If a painter like Claude expresses some of God’s benevolent design toward mankind―as he does―then our joy is genuine as we look at the world as a divine painting, a canvas helping us men to learn and dwell, serve, grow and be saved by he that stretcheth out the heavens as nothing, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in (Is 40:22). May this image and similar ones unfold before our mind like the sails unfurl in Claude’s painted harbour, catching the divine breeze that propels ship and crew, heart and soul, toward the blissful embrace of the rising Sun.