Winter Landscape

Look at the lower right corner of this small winter panel. Verstralen signed it there with his monogram, the letters AVS run together, and added a date in which one digit can no longer be read, 16-something-3. The Mauritshuis reads it as 1623. That puts the panel early in his career, some years before he is known to have been working in Amsterdam.

It came to the museum in 1901 as a gift from Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, the Dutch art historian who compiled a many-volume catalogue of 17th-century Dutch painters and gave works to museums in The Hague and Groningen. The painting belongs to the Mauritshuis and hangs in the Gallery Prince Willem V on the Buitenhof in The Hague.