A waterfall with travellers on a footbridge and a castle beyond

The attribution of this painting, which passed through the hands of a number of leading collectors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was never questioned until Seymour Slive expressed reservations in his 2001 catalogue raisonné. Slive, who found the ‘cotton-like effect of the agitated water’ unusual, may never have known the painting at firsthand and his reservations do not withstand further scrutiny (op. cit.).

Slive was equally noncommittal on the identification of the structure as Bentheim Castle in western Germany, an idea which has more to recommend it. Ruisdael, who had visited the castle with Nicolaes Berchem in the early 1650s, painted it on several occasions following his return to the Netherlands, including in examples today in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (inv. no. NGI.4531) and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (inv. no. SK-A-347). As Slive has pointed out, Ruisdael would at times take liberties with the castle’s architectural details, but several factors argue against its identification with Bentheim here. The view would be from the southeast, not unlike that seen in a painting of Bentheim in the National Gallery, London, which the museum gives to an imitator of Ruisdael but Slive thought was almost certainly by Jan van Kessel (op. cit.). However, unlike the London painting, there is no evidence of the spire of the Catherina Church, which rises prominently above the walls in the London painting. Similarly, the high ‘Pulverturm’ visible in Ruisdael’s other depictions of the castle is squatter here.