A portrayal of a Mediterranean port, on the left, with a church on the hill and houses coming down to the edge of the water. Several groups of people can be seen on the shore. In the centre middle distance is a walled town with hills beyond. A Dutch ship is shown, in stern view to the beholder, dominating the harbour entrance. She bears a family coat of arms on her tafferel and flies the Dutch flag. Another ship enters the harbour to the right. In the foreground are two wide bottomed boats from which men are unloading stores. In addition to marines, sea battles and townscapes, Beerstraaten painted Italianate harbours. His depictions offer a view of the coast, usually at some distance. Frequently Beerstraaten placed a few ships on the water and small figures on the quay, with a consistent emphasis on the architecture. Many of these Italianate harbour views contain identifiable buildings, from classical Roman architecture to northern churches, as is the case in this painting. Until recently this painting was titled ‘Dutch Ships in a Southern Harbour’.

An almost identical version of the four-towered church, to the left, appears in a painting made by Beerstraaten in 1652, in the Louvre in Paris. Moreover, the painter portrayed this church from the opposite direction in a work recorded in a private collection in France in 1984. The building is the cathedral of Saint Jean at Lyons, a Gothic church situated on the river Saône in the centre of the city. Beerstraaten has moved it and the surrounding architecture to a Mediterranean harbour. Lyons was a favourite destination for Dutch tourists in the seventeenth century. Frequently travellers stopped there on their way to Italy. From Lyons it took another five or six days to cross the Alps and arrive in Turin. Dutch artists such as Karel du Jardin, Adriaen van der Cabel and Herman van Swanevelt stayed briefly or for some time in the city on the Rhône and Saône rivers. Beerstraaten himself was never in Lyons. He derived the motif of the cathedral from a drawing by his fellow townsman Johannes Lingelbach, now in the Graphische Sammlung Albertina in Vienna. Lingelbach drew the cityscape of Lyons between 1642 and 1644 during his stay in the French city. In his sketchbook, he made a panoramic drawing of the Saône and the buildings on both sides of the river, with the cathedral of Saint Jean depicted on the left.

Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten was born in Amsterdam in 1622. By 1642 he was married and soon fathered eleven children. He continued to live and work in Amsterdam. His houses, first near the Haarlemmerpoort and from 1651 on the north side of the Rozengracht near the Lijnbaansgracht, were named ‘In ‘t Schipbreuk’ (‘In the Shipwreck’). Beerstraaten must have made several trips through Friesland, Holland and Utrecht. The drawings he made during these journeys were later used in the preparation of his paintings. Beerstraaten died in 1666, two years after his second marriage, and was buried at the Sint Anthonis Kerkhof in Amsterdam. This painting was previously recorded as by Johannes Beerstraaten or Beerstraten but the general view is that while Jan Abrahamsz signed 'Johan', as in this case ('Johan Beerstraaten 1660', lower left), they are the same man (1622-66): Beerstraten, with one 'a', simply appears to be a common spelling slip in English.