River View with a Ferry and a Bastion

The Frans Hals Museum owns several highly atmospheric river views by Salomon van Ruysdael. The painter was one of the many major and minor masters who specialized in this genre. Works like this give us a fascinating picture of the marshy countryside full of ditches, rivers and lakes that Holland always was – and in part still is. In this painting, Van Ruysdael combined an unidentified parish church with a fortification, some trees and various boats on a large stretch of water. The scene centres on the ferry in the foreground: livestock and people are being taken to the other side by a ferryman, who pulls his boat across the water with a long rope. The painter placed his signature and a date, ‘svruysdael.1664’ on this ferry. There are dozens of these river views with ferry by Van Ruysdael, but he always succeeded in varying them.