River Landscape with Fishermen in a Rowboat

This was painted around 1645, when Cuyp was still a young man working in the manner of the older Dutch river painters. In those years the fashion was for muted, silvery light and low horizons, and you can see it here. A wide pale sky sits over calm water, the far bank barely a smudge. The golden glow he later became known for has not arrived yet. The subject is nothing grand. A few fishermen work a rowboat on the broad river near his home town of Dordrecht, the everyday traffic of a Dutch waterway that fed the whole region. Cuyp built the picture around that quiet labour rather than any event. It later entered the Basel collection Bachofen-Burckhardt, whose old-master paintings now hang in the Kunstmuseum there.