River Landscape with Peasants in a Ferryboat

In May 1914, the last spring before the war, the Academy of Arts in Berlin put on a show of old pictures lent by members of a society of friends of the city's museums. This river view was one of them, and its lender was James Simon, a cotton merchant and one of the great patrons of Berlin. His money had paid for the German dig at Amarna in Egypt, where the painted bust of Queen Nefertiti came out of the ground in December 1912.

Van Goyen painted the panel in 1648. A ferry loaded with passengers and cattle crosses a river under a wide sky, with the trees dark against the light. He worked scenes like this up in the studio from chalk sketches made on his travels, and he got the reflections in the water with thin glazes laid over the warm ground of the panel.

By 1927 the picture had passed to a dealer in Berlin. It went on to a collection in Amsterdam and then to Britain, and in 1994 the Boston collectors Eijk and Rose-Marie van Otterloo bought it at auction in New York. They gave it to the museum in 2017.