Paisaje con un castillo en ruinas y una iglesia

Nothing in this view is a real place. Ruisdael, the leading landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, assembled it from ideas about how Holland ought to look. The church commanding the horizon has never been matched to a real building. To the Dutch buyers who commissioned large pictures like this one, around 1665, each part carried weight. The windmill and the ripening corn stood for a productive, prosperous land, the ruined castle for the pull of history, and the church for something permanent above it all. It was almost certainly painted to hang in a very large room, and it repeats, on a grander scale, a smaller landscape Ruisdael had already made. The country it flatters had recently won its independence from Spain after 80 years of war.