This is one of more than forty paintings (Beck, op. cit., III, 1987, p. 285) that van Goyen dated in the prolific year, 1655, just before his death. It employs the more colorful variant of the "tonal" painting style that the artist adopted in the last half-dozen years of his life. Most of his late paintings are marines, broad river views or scenes of open estuaries; rarer are the more closed designs featuring a side canal, village or wooded landscape. Writing in her catalogue of the exhibition held in New York in 1988, Ann Adams noted the thematic precedents of a drawing dated 1624 by the little-known Coenraet van Schilperoort (1577-1636), who was van Goyen's first teacher, as well as van Goyen's own drawings and paintings from the early 1630's (op. cit., 1988, p. 72). She also correctly observed the resemblance to an engraving of a footbridge over a canal by Adriaen van Ostade (Bartsch no. 26).

The time-honored, space-enhancing device of a bridge viewed perpendicularly and contre-jour had been employed by van Goyen as early as 1625 (see for example, the picture in Bremen, Kunsthalle, 1939, Inv. no. 48; Beck, op.cit., 1973, II, no. 239, illustrated), figured prominently in his landscapes with a tondo format from the late 1620's and early 30's (ibid., II, nos. 115, 122, and III, no. 110), and recurred with some frequency in works from his mature career (see, for example, View of Hofstede Arnestein dated 1646, Harold Samuel collection, Mansion House, London, Beck, op. cit., 1973, II, p. 346, no. 769). His drawings of the late 1640's and early 1650's also take up the theme of figures on a bridge with fishermen (ibid., I, no. 173, dated 1648, nos. 237, and 246, dated 1651, and III, no. 511, dated 1653). The present work, therefore, is the culmination of almost thirty years of van Goyen's examination of a favorite landscape theme