River Landscape with a View of Naarden

Salomon van Ruysdael (Dutch, about 1602–1670)

1642

Medium
Oil on panel
Classification
Painting
Dimensions
59.7 × 85.1 cm (23 1/2 × 33 1/2 in.); Framed: 83.2 × 107.3 × 7 cm (32 3/4 × 42 1/4 × 2 3/4 in.)
Culture
Netherlands
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
Credit line
Gift of Nuveen
Rights
Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
Who can see it
Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed

View at the Art Institute of Chicago

About this work

In this river scene, Salomon van Ruysdael applied his reduced color palette with an impressive array of techniques to render the atmosphere of approaching rain. He created rippling waters with thinly applied, striated strokes of steelblue paint that reveal the pink preparatory ground below. He invoked the breeze fluttering through the leaves by varying light green and brown paint in quickly stippled strokes of a small brush. Such “tonal” landscapes became popular in the Netherlands, in part because they could capture the effects of the area’s capricious weather.

Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0