River View with Church and Ferry

A flat ferry loaded with cows is crossing a wide, slow river, the herdsmen standing among the animals. More cattle graze on the meadow beyond, and further out a sailing boat with a pennant at the masthead heads the other way. Salomon van Ruysdael signed and dated the picture 1649 on one of the boats.

The church with its tall spire and the small castle further along the bank are his invention. No such place stands on a Dutch river, though the leaning trees, the flat meadows and the heavy summer clouds all belong to Holland. The bank on the left and the band of clouds both run away on a diagonal, and that is how a panel just over a metre wide opens into so much distance.

The painting belonged to Abraham Bredius, the art historian who had directed the Mauritshuis. He lent it to the museum from 1912 and left it there when he died in 1946.