View of the Rhine at Reineck

On the back of this small panel Saftleven wrote down where and when: Bij Rijneck, near Rheineck, then his own name, Hermanus Saft Leven of Utrecht, and Anno 1654. Rheineck is a castle above the Middle Rhine between Bonn and Koblenz. On the front the river is crowded with boats at a landing place, and on the left, in a village with its church, people are dancing in front of an inn. Saftleven had been painting Rhine views for only a few years, and scholars regard many of them as partly invented.

The panel belonged to Adriaan Leonard van Heteren, a collector in The Hague. In 1809 Louis Napoleon, Napoleon's brother and king of Holland, bought his entire collection for the new Royal Museum in Amsterdam, the forerunner of the Rijksmuseum. The Rijksmuseum still owns the panel, and since 2000 it has been on long-term loan to the Mauritshuis, which hangs it in the Gallery Prince Willem V in The Hague.