A Rhenish landscape at sunset

In the early 1650s, Herman Saftleven embarked upon the first of several trips through the Rhineland. The region’s hilly landscape cut by river valleys evidently made a lasting impression on the artist, for he returned to it in small-scale, exquisitely rendered landscapes like this for the remainder of his career. These poetic and refined depictions of the Rhenish landscape established him as one of the most original landscapists during the Dutch Golden Age and earned him the praise of contemporaries like the poet Joost van den Vondel, who penned several panygerics on Saftleven's work and described him as the 'geachten Rijnstroomschilder Herman Zaftleven' ('esteemed Rhine river painter Herman Saftleven').
Meticulously rendered rays of light emanate from the partially veiled afternoon sun, giving rise to the painting’s luminous atmospheric effects. The explicit inclusion of such a light source is rarely encountered within seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting (see F.J. Duparc, Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection, exhibition catalogue, Salem, 2011, p. 259, under no. 51). Saftleven, perhaps more than any other artist in the period, exploited its possibilities to great effect, most notably in late paintings like the present work executed from around 1670 on.