Landscape with stream and farmstead

Around 1641, when this small panel was painted, Dutch artists were settling into a subject their grandparents would have found too plain to bother with: their own ordinary countryside. No mythology, no Italian ruins. Isaac van Ostade gives us a farmstead beside a stream, the sort of working, out-of-the-way spot a traveller in Holland would pass without stopping. The scene rests on that water and the low farm buildings along its bank, and nothing in it asks to be called grand. It belongs to the same Haarlem world as landscape painters like Salomon van Ruysdael, who made a living from flat fields, plain skies and river banks. The little picture was later thought good enough to stand for its kind. Wolfgang Stechow reproduced it in his standard survey of 17th-century Dutch landscape, and it hangs today in the Kunstmuseum Basel.