Long attributed to Jacob van Ruisdael, this painting (in an unpublished opinion) was assigned by Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, to the Haarlem painter, Gerrit van Hees, before it was recognized by Kurt Erich Simon as an important and rare work by Jacob's father, Isaack van Ruisdael (see Simon's formative article on that painter's small oeuvre in Burlington Magazine, op. cit., pp. 7-23). Simon compared the painting's style and conception to Isaack's signed Landscape with a Plank Fence in the Akademie der bildenden Kunste, Vienna. The painting is of special historical interest for its close resemblance to Jacob's earliest dated paintings of 1646