The Drawbridge

The column at the corner of the house on the right resembles one from Amsterdam's old town hall, the medieval building on the Dam that burned down in 1652. Here it stands in a street of van der Heyden's own making, beside a canal and a drawbridge in summer light. A gentleman with a dog waits by the column, a man pushes a wheelbarrow over the bridge, and an angler sits on the quay wall.

Van der Heyden signed his name on one of the two millstones in the foreground. On the pier of the bridge there is a painted fish, or possibly a whale. This panel and its pendant, The Stone Bridge, entered the national collection together, bought in 1808, the year King Louis Napoleon moved the collection to Amsterdam.