A winter landscape with a view of a town and wooden bridge

Jacob van Ruisdael’s winter landscapes form one of the smallest and rarest groups of works in his oeuvre with only around thirty pictures known. Often painted on a small scale, it is thought that the artist began painting such scenes following his move to Amsterdam in 1655, at the moment he began to broaden and expand his range of landscape genres and motifs. This small work was been dated to this period by Rosenberg, an opinion shared by Slive who demonstrated the similarity it bears with a Jan Beerstraaten’s The Castle of Muiden in Winter, dated to circa 1658 by Stechow, in the National Gallery, London (inv. no. NG1311).

Ruisdael restricts his palette to cool greys and browns and uses swift strokes of white paint to form the frost covered branches on the trees, techniques which serve to underscore the atmospheric qualities of the picture. The heavy, snow-laden clouds with the light starting to fade beyond them atmospherically capture the harshness of the Dutch winter. Typical of his early winter landscapes, the slightly hazy atmosphere without definite accentuations are employed to particular effect in the present work. Slive has suggested that the consistently small scale of Ruisdael’s winter landscapes suggests that they were intended for intimate, close viewing, similar to the way prints or drawings were conceived.