Attributed to Jan Griffier I

Attributed to Jan Griffier I means the museum takes a picture to be his without proof of his hand. With Griffier the doubt has a particular source. His son Robert, born in London in 1688, trained with him and painted the same kind of crowded river views and winter scenes, and a grandson, Jan Griffier II, carried the trade on into the 1770s. A name reading Griffier on a canvas does not by itself settle which of them held the brush.

When the elder Griffier died in 1718, the pictures left in his studio were sold at auction. Prince Eugene of Savoy, the great general of the Habsburg armies and a keen collector, probably bought a good part of his Griffiers then, and his pictures were later acquired for the Savoy court in Turin.