A wooded river landscape, with figures and a cottage near a footbridge

This landscape, dated 1635, is among Aert van der Neer’s earliest works and belongs to a small group that are datable to between 1632 and 1640. While van der Neer was already referred to as a painter at the time of his marriage in Amsterdam in 1629, his earliest dated painting is the Interior with four figures of 1632 in the Oblastní Galerie, Liberec (Schulz, op. cit., no. 1447), with dated landscapes only beginning to appear the following year. These early landscapes demonstrate the influence of Jochem Camphuysen, with whom van der Neer collaborated on paintings like the Village landscape with a road of 1633 (Private collection), which was signed by both artists (Schulz, op. cit., no. 1065). Like van der Neer, Camphuysen was born in Gorinchem but moved to Amsterdam at some point in the 1620s. So close was van der Neer with the Camphuysen family that Jochem’s brother Rafael, also a painter, witnessed the baptism of van der Neer’s daughter, Cornelia, on 28 December 1642.

In addition to the works of the brothers Camphuysen, van der Neer’s early landscapes of the 1630s suggest the influence of another Gorinchem-born artist of an earlier generation – Abraham Bloemaert – as well as contemporary developments in tonal landscape painting in Haarlem and Leiden and, not least, those of the Flemish tradition. Wolfgang Schulz, for example, has posited that van der Neer had access to Boëtius Adamsz. Bolswert’s engraved series of farmhouses and landscapes after drawings by Bloemaert (op. cit., p. 23). While no direct connection between these prints and the present painting can be drawn, general similarities exist in the way van der Neer has integrated his humble structures within a voluminously tree-filled landscape. The composition’s muted palette of pale greens, blues and browns also suggests the young painter’s awareness of new trends in landscape painting being brought forth by the likes of Esaias van de Velde, Jan van Goyen, Jan van de Velde II, Salomon van Ruysdael and Pieter Molijn, while the symmetrical structure with clumps of trees arranged on either side of a receding vista, and the painting's pronounced horizontal format, both hark back to an earlier generation of Flemish landscape painting.

In his catalogue raisonné, Schulz noted the remarkable advances van der Neer made in the two years between his earliest dated landscape of 1633 and this painting, describing the present example as ‘vastly superior’ to the earlier work (op. cit., p. 27; no dated landscapes are known from 1634). The shapes of trees in other dated paintings from the same year, including the circular Landscape with trees, houses and five figures to the right (Schulz, op. cit., no. 1223), are considerably closer to his earlier landscape. Only the undated Bank of a river with trees and an angler (ibid., no. 1280), which Schulz suggests was painted in the same year as the present painting, displays similarly elongated, soaring trees that would come to define van der Neer’s mature landscapes and estuary scenes.