Salomon van Ruysdael

This imposing painting on canvas is on a particularly large scale amongst Ruysdael's œuvre. It depicts a river landscape – the subject that the artist returned to throughout his career with seemingly limitless invention, and for which he is most acclaimed – in which figures in rowing boats sit beside the fishing nets they have thrown out into the water; kaags, slightly larger, flat-bottomed boats with masts, are under sail in the distance. 

Ruysdael's preoccupation with the weather and its effect on landscape might be said to be most strongly felt in a work like this, in choosing to paint a slightly overcast, rather ordinary afternoon, to which he nevertheless lends an air of majesty in the form of the large tree deliberately positioned in the centre of the composition, and a distinct sense of subtlety and tranquility in the gentle reflections of the sky and clouds in the water. The human presence in a picture so apparently concerned with nature, however, is not incidental – the men fishing and in the working boats are among those contributing to the development and upkeep of the Dutch Republic, and the people's pride in building a nation largely based on water, triumphing over canals, rivers and the sea.

This painting is previously recorded as being dated 1643, which fits with the tonal quality found in Ruysdael's works throughout the 1630s and early 1640s, when the artist was most influenced by the monochromatic paintings of Jan van Goyen.