Travelling the vast network of inland waterways on sketching trips in a small boat, Jan van Goyen made a specialty of landscapes depicting the country's placid rivers, canals and estuaries. Beginning in 1638 (see National Gallery, London, Inv. no. 2580; Beck, op. cit., II, no. 168, illustrated) and continuing through the 1640s and early 1650s (ibid., nos. 172, 181, 183, 189, and 192), he painted a series of marines on an upright format. Often more than three-quarters of these images is devoted to a towering cloud-filled sky. The date on the present picture was read as 1641 when it was exhibited in London in 1966 by Leonard Koetser, but was correctly deciphered by Beck in his 1973 catalogue raisonné of the artist's work as 1651. The bolder use of value contrasts and reintroduction of color accents in, for example, the blue of the present work's sky are characteristic of van Goyen's manner in the last half-dozen years of his life. However, motifs such as the silhouetted fisherman in the boat in the foreground and the repoussoir of cows on the bank to the right were space-enhancing devices he had employed since the late 1620s. Beyond and to the left of the overbooked passenger vessel and the leading mark on a spit of land in the middle distance is the blunt tower of a church that may be the Grote Kerk in Dordrecht, one of van Goyen's favorite monuments