A military skirmish in a wooded landscape

This painting is among the earliest works by Jan Asselijn, who alongside Jan Both and Jan Baptist Weenix is regarded as one of the most important Dutch Italianate landscapists of the mid-seventeenth century. Anne Charlotte Steland-Stief has suggested that the painting, which displays the influence of Asselijn’s master, the battle painter Jan Martszen de Jonge, dates to around 1634 on the basis of its similarities with a work dating to that year in the Herzog-Anton-Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig (loc. cit.).