Landscape at the Edge of Woods

Jan Wijnants signed this canvas in the lower right and dated it 1659, and the date places it at a turning point. Within a year or so he had left Haarlem, the town whose dunes and woodland edges he had been painting, for Amsterdam. The subject is exactly that border country, open ground running up to the edge of a wood.

The picture is among the early purchases of the Mauritshuis. The museum opened its doors to the public in 1822 and bought this landscape seven years later, in 1829, from the Van Eyck collection. It still belongs to the Mauritshuis, and today it hangs a few minutes' walk away in the museum's second venue, the Gallery Prince Willem V on the Buitenhof in The Hague.