River View with a Man Hunting Ducks

The date on this panel is only half legible. Salomon van Ruysdael put his initials and a year on the boat that carries the hunter, and the last two digits have worn so far that the museum reads them as 1648, with a question mark. If that reading is right, he painted it in the year the Peace of Münster ended 80 years of war between the Dutch and Spain.

Nothing of that war reaches this river. A man out after ducks sits in a small boat close to us, and the rest of the panel, not quite 70 centimetres wide, belongs to calm water, a low bank and the sky. The Mauritshuis bought the painting from the Kleinberger gallery in Paris in 1905 and owns it, and it hangs in the museum's second venue, the Gallery Prince Willem V on the Buitenhof in The Hague.