Porcellis's significance only becomes fully apparent when one reviews the long line of artists who are indebted to him. They include the greatest masters of the marine, such as Simon de Vlieger, Jan van de Cappelle, Willem van de Velde the Younger, Ludolf Bakhuizen and Jan van Goyen, who in turn inspired the artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
"The art of his brush excels especially in the natural depiction of storms at sea, in which the thunderclouds that turn day into night, and the mighty streaks of lightning that emerge from the massed clouds, flash so naturally against rocks, beaches and the foaming brine that a landsman would be afeared of the sea", wrote the eighteenth-century Houbraken.