View of a village road with a well by a church

One of the most accomplished landscapists active in a country and a time where great landscapists abound, Simon de Vlieger’s drawings are still often confused with those of others, especially Anthonie Waterloo. His compositions are more structured, his style is more regular than Waterloo’s, as can be seen in a sheet signed with De Vlieger’s monogram at the Albertina (inv. 9168). The site represented in that drawing could be the same as the one in the drawing offered here, seen from a different direction; it has been proposed that the church is that of Eikenduinen, near The Hague, but that building was already a ruin by the time De Vlieger would have drawn it. A second version of the composition, of lesser quality but close in style to De Vlieger, was formerly with R.W.P. de Vries (Dessins de maîtres anciens et modernes, no. 1, Amsterdam, 1929, p. 215, ill., as Roelant Roghman); another version, probably the work of another hand, is at the Victoria and Albert Museum (inv. DYCE.547; see J. Shoaf Turner and C. White, Dutch & Flemish drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London 2014, I, no. 413, ill., as possibly by Simon de Vlieger). A drawing formerly with Theo Laurentius, representing a farm house with a bridge near a river, is of the same size and in the same style and technique as the present sheet, and is also framed by the artist with a chalk line, suggesting they were made at the same time, possibly as a kind of series.