River in a Mountain Valley

At a Paris auction in April 1803 this canvas was catalogued as a view of the mountains of the Tyrol. It was bought for the Louvre, then called the Muséum, through a buyer recorded only as Robert, probably a dealer rather than the painter Hubert Robert, who had once helped run the collection. The scenery is Scandinavian. Allaert van Everdingen had drawn the rivers and forests of Norway and Sweden on his journey of 1644, and for years afterwards he turned those sketches into invented northern landscapes for buyers at home in Holland.

This one gathers the motifs he came back to again and again. A river breaks into white rapids over the rocks, wooden houses and a mill stand among fir trees on the bank, a church sits high on a crag, and a party of hunters rides along the path. The Louvre's catalogue dates the picture about 1650, while its own commentary places it at the end of the 1650s, some 15 years after the journey that supplied the scenery.