Landscape with a ruined tower and travelers on a path

The present work was most likely painted late in Molyjn's career, after his tonal phase, when his palette became brighter and his compositions more complex, perhaps under the influence of Hercules Seghers. The same ruin appears in a similarly hilly landscape with a horseman on a track in a signed and dated drawing of 1660 (British Museum, London), the year before he died.

Ruins featured prominently in seventeenth century Dutch landscape painting, both those of identifiable buildings destroyed during decades of war and fantasy ruins created to lend atmosphere and poignancy to a scene. There were several well-known ruins in and around Haarlem and, while Molijn's tower does not reflect the appearance of any particular one of them, it has the generalized characteristics of several famous ruins including the bell tower of the ruined monastery at Rijnsburg.