A river landscape with a ferry and Kronenburg Castle in the background

Depictions of ferry boats conveying passengers and animals across bodies of water are among the most enduring images in Salomon van Ruysdael’s work, with surviving paintings dating from 1631 until 1667. The earliest examples are conceived in muted tones characteristic of Jan van Goyen, but around 1640 Ruysdael freed himself from the elder artist’s work in favor of images conceived with brighter colors, increased emphasis on cloud-filled skies and broader expanses of water. Wolfgang Stechow has identified the structure in the central background as that of Kronenburg Castle in Loenen aan de Vecht near Utrecht (loc. cit.). Razed in 1837, the twelfth-century castle is shown from the other direction in a drawing by Roelant Roghman dating to only a year or so later (formerly Museum Boymans, Rotterdam; for a copy of the drawing, see H.W.M. van der Wyck, De kasteeltekeningen van Roelant Roghman, I, Alphen aan den Rijn, 1989, p. 115, no. 95, illustrated).