This painting is one of several dramatic, monumentally conceived images that Jacob van Ruisdael executed toward the end of the early phase of his career. While Ruisdael frequently dated paintings in the period from 1646 to 1653, few later works bear dates. The date, 1653, on this painting also appears on several of the master's grandest works, including his Bentheim Castle (formerly Beit Collection, now National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, Inv. no. 4531) and Two Water Mills with Open Sluice (J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, Inv. no. 82.PA.18). Like the latter two pictures and a painting also of 1653 in the Museum in Angers (Inv. no. 405; Hofstede de Groot, op. cit., IV, no. 73), the present work attests to his trip in the early 1650's to Westphalia and the area around the Dutch and German border. The type of half timbered houses with tie-beam construction and distinctive plank gables that appear at the upper right are indigenous to the region of Twenthe and the western parts of Nordrhein-Westfalen (for discussion of such buildings in Ruisdael's art, see Seymour Slive in the catalogue of the exhibition, Jacob van Ruisdael, The Hague, Mauritshuis, 1981, p. 181; for the history of the architecture, see Josef Schepers, Haus und Hof Westfalischer Baurn, Munster, 1976). Ruisdael made drawings of these buildings on his trip (see, for example, the sheet in the Teylers Museum, Haarlem, no. Q*51; exhibited at The Hague, op. cit., 1981, no. 70, illustrated) which later served to supplement his memory when he executed an etching of them (Bartsch, no. 1) and several paintings featuring houses of this type: compare the structures, for example, in the paintings in the National Gallery, London, Inv. no. 2564, in the Henle Collection, Duisberg (Rosenberg, op. cit., 1928, no. 494) and formerly at Holker Hall (sold at Christie's, London, April 11, 1986, lot 42). This type of construction seems to have piqued the curiosity of Dutch travelers; in the travel journal of the artist Vincent Laurensz. van de Vinne, who visited Germany in 1652, there is a sketch of half-timbered farmhouses and the note: "the farms or village houses are constructed in a droll (klugtigh) fashion of clay, wood, and thatch (and sufficiently in this manner, which I have drawn from life)" (for the Dutch text, see Vincent Laurensz. van de Vinne, Dagelijckse aentekeninge van Vincent Laurensz. van de Vinne ed. by B. Sliggers, 1979, p. 50, illutrated p. 51).

The motif of a blasted tree had been employed by earlier landscapists, notably the mannerists Roelandt Savery and Abraham Bloemaert, and had appeared in several of Ruisdael's earliest paintings (see, for example, the Blasted Tree by a Cottage in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, dated 164[7?], and The View of Egmond dated 1648, Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire). Ruisdael also favored combining this motif with a rushing stream; compare the paintings formerly in the A. Schloss Collection, Paris (Rosenberg op. cit., 1928, no. 230) and that sold in New York, June 4, 1987, lot 73 (ibid., no. 338). So universally is Ruisdael's art associated with rushing streams, cataracts, and waterfalls that his contemporaries (including Arnold Houbraken and Jan Luyken) remarked that his very name ("Ruis-dal" in Dutch means valley of noise; ruisen is to rustle or murmur) seemed to herald his favorite theme. Ruisdael's waterfalls and rushing streams have sometimes been interpreted (see especially Wilfred Wiegand, Ruisdael-Studien: Ein Versuch zur Ikonologie der Landschaftsmalerei, dissertation, 1971, pp. 87-98, 265, note 491) as symbols of transitoriness. While the richly varied iconography of the blasted tree also can be a vanitas symbol, it is unclear to what extent Ruisdael conceived a metaphorical dimension in landscapes such as this one