Landscape by Moonlight

In 1710 an inventory of the Amsterdam house of Jan Six, the friend and patron of Rembrandt, listed an evening scene by Aert van der Neer in the art room. The museum thinks it was probably this panel. If so, it stayed with the Six family for more than 200 years, until they sold it in 1928. The oil magnate Henri Deterding then gave it to the Rijksmuseum in 1936, together with 17 other paintings. Van der Neer made it in the first half of the 1650s, with very few colours. The moon hangs low over a wide river, and its cold light catches the water, the windowpanes of the houses at the left and the white feathers of the ducks in the foreground. Two horse-drawn carts move along the road, and out on the water a fisherman stands in his boat.