A sawmill on a river at the edge of a wood

Allart van Everdingen was the originator of the Scandinavian mountain landscapes in Dutch 17th Century painting. His landscapes are dominated by steep mountains and waterfalls with few human beings.
The present unpublished painting is thus an addition to the oeuvre, compiled by A.I. Davies, Allart van Everdingen, 1975; it's horizontal format, small scale and close-up view suggests a dating to the early years of the artist, circa 1647/8. It is to be compared with the Waterfall with a village in the Hermitage (Davies, op. cit., n051, fig.149) and the Waterfall in the Museum of Western Art, Kiev (Davies, op. cit., n052, fig. 150). Davies considers these latter paintings to be slightly earlier than the Landscape with a Waterfall of 1649 in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nýrnberg (Davies, op. cit. n053, fig.152).
The watermill depicted in the present painting is probably that sketched by the artist at Mölndal, near Götebörg during his trip to Norway and Sweden in 1644/5 (Braunfels collection; Davies, op. cit.); it also occurs in the picture recorded in the Holscher-Stumpf Collection, Berlin (Davies, op. cit., n047, fig. 137). Van Everdingen's interest in the wild mountainous landscape was probably inspired by his master Roelant Savery, who had introduced similar mountain scenes in the early 1610's following his stay in Prague, where he had made numerous sketches en plein air in the mountains of Bohemia and Tirol. There is no documented evidence confirming that Van Everdingen was Savery's pupil; but A. Houbraken, in the Groote Schouburgh, states that he was, which can be safely accepted according to Davies, op. cit., p.102.