Three Painted Wall Hangings of a Dutch Landscape

In 1776 an Amsterdam widow, Maria Everdina Bolten, ordered five large landscape canvases for the garden room of her house on the Nieuwe Doelenstraat. Fixed to the walls and broken only by the panelling, windows and doors, they made one continuous Dutch countryside, so that a room in the middle of the city looked out on a river with an open drawbridge, a farm, an inn and a country house.

Three of the canvases survive. They belong to the Amsterdam Museum, which lends them to the Rijksmuseum, and the Rijksmuseum gives them, with a cautious attributed to, to the wall painter Jurriaan Andriessen. Each is more than three metres tall. On this one a rider on a grey horse has stopped at a wooden gate by a cottage under tall trees, and a man in an apron is talking to him while a woman watches from the window.