A river Landscape with a Hayloft among Trees, a Ferryboat laden with Passengers and Cattle, and a Rowing Boat in the foreground, Sailing Vessels, a Church and Cottages in the distance

Salomon van Ruysdael had begun painting river scenes by 1631 and made the theme a central feature of his art by 1645, constantly discovering new expressive possibilities in a limited group of motifs and compositional elements. Favoring a diagonally receding riverbank with trees gracefully extending up and over the surface of the water and a few small vessels distributed over the river or canal, he captured all the quiet atmospheric beauty of Holland's network of inland waterways. The present painting may be compared to an extended series of similarly conceived river scenes with a dominant left bank and a silhouetted and companionably overbooked ferryboat serving as a repoussoir enhancing space on the right: compare, for example, the paintings of 1645 (Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Stechow, op.cit., no. 348), 1649 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Inv. no. A3983; Stechow, no. 358, pl. 24; and Dienst Verspreide Rijkscollecties, The Hague, Inv. no. NK1519; Stechow, no. 355, pl. 25); 1653 (Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem, Inv. no. 598c; Stechow, no. 371, pl. 27, fig. 37); 1661 (Sotheby's, London, April 19, 1989, lot 35; Stechow, no. 380) and 1663 (Christie's, London, July 7, 1986, lot 42). Even the ferryboat and its passengers were creatively varied and repeated; compare the present vessel to that in the river scene of 1661 in the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (Stechow, no. 379). Stechow (op. cit., p. 132) observed that the same belfry with stork's nest reappears in the distance of his catalogue nos. 175, 352 and 454. Yet for all his numerous variations on the theme, Ruysdael creates in each case a fresh image plausible as an actual site, never the formulaic product of the studio.