The Lake of Zurich

For years this canvas was taken for a view of Lake Trasimeno in central Italy. The mistake is easy to follow, because Jan Hackaert painted it in the warm, golden light that Dutch painters of his day used for Italian scenes, and whether he ever went to Italy himself is unclear. The place is in fact Swiss. The water lying between the two mountain ranges is the Lake of Zurich together with the Obersee, its upper basin, and around 1660 Hackaert composed the panorama from drawings he had made near Zurich. The Rijksmuseum counts it among the earliest topographical paintings of the Alps.

In June 1897 the Vereniging Rembrandt, a Dutch society that raises money to keep art in the country's museums, bought it at the sale of the De Clercq collection in Amsterdam, and the Rijksmuseum acquired it from them in January 1898.