River landscape with travellers, a horse and cart next to a barn and windmills in the distance

Aelbert Cuyp probably came into contact with Jan van Goyen in the early 1640s, when the elder artist visited Dordrecht on several occasions. Van Goyen was to have an immediate impact on Cuyp, whose artistic production in the period clearly conveys his awareness of the tonal landscapes then being produced by van Goyen, Salomon van Ruysdael and Herman Saftleven.

While Stephen Reiss dated the painting to circa 1642 (op. cit.), a slightly earlier dating of circa 1640 was favoured when it was a late addition to the seminal Cuyp retrospective held in 2001-2002 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington; National Gallery, London; and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (op. cit.). A drawing depicting several houses and mills, now in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett (fig. 1), appears to have provided the starting point for the distant landscape in this painting. Cuyp evidently initially intended a somewhat more tightly cropped composition (fig. 2), but in the process of the painting’s creation decided to extend it first by 11.5 centimetres at left before adding a second board approximately 14 centimetres in height to the top of the panel. The horizontal addition appears to have driven the addition of the figural group in the left foreground.

This painting subsequently served as the model for another that is datable to circa 1642-4 and exhibits changes and eliminations of certain details (sold Christie’s, New York, 31 May 1991, lot 141).