Torrent with Oak Trees

Around 1611 or 1612 the Haarlem printmaker and publisher Claes Jansz Visscher brought out a set of 12 small etchings he called pleasant places, inns, farms and roads in the countryside just outside Haarlem. They are counted among the first prints of the northern Dutch landscape, and they treated the ordinary country around a town as worth a picture. Ruisdael was born in Haarlem some 15 years later, and the museum sees this canvas, painted around 1670, as a continuation of that local tradition. It calls the composition idealised and harmonious, built from oaks, a wooded slope and a rushing stream. It is worth looking low down, by the path. At the foot of the slope, near a wooden bridge over the water, a family has stopped to rest.