A wooded landscape with shipping on a river, a village nearby

In the 1640s van Goyen reached the pinnacle of his creative work. He started to move away from the example of his teacher Esaias van de Velde just before 1630 and developed his characteristic tonal landscapes during the 1630s, mainly under the influence of the Haarlem painters Pieter Molijn and Salomon van Ruysdael. Van Goyen was able to capture an enormous range of atmospheric effects and achieved a masterly sense of depth in his compositions, even though he restricted himself to a limited palette. Different tones of green play an important part in the overall effect of the present composition. Later in the same decade van Goyen started to introduce more colour into his tonal landscapes again. The banks of the river that form a stage for gentlemen stopping at an inn, peasants conversing and boats mooring are all elements that are often encountered in works by van Goyen, for instance River landscape with gentlemen at an inn in the collection of the Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft Bern also dated 1643 (H.-U. Beck, op. cit., 1973, II, pp. 233-4, no. 495).