Extensive landscape with figures near a river

Although better known in his own era for his portraits and genre scenes of domestic life, Philips Koninck is today celebrated as the foremost painter of panoramic landscapes in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. Born in Amsterdam, Koninck was a pupil of Rembrandt, whose influence is felt throughout his works.

The present canvas is a late work by Koninck, dated by Sumowski to around 1676 (op. cit.). It belongs to a small group of similar landscapes, of which one, in the Rijskmuseum, Amsterdam, is dated 1676 (inv. no. A 206; see Sumowski, op. cit., pp. 1551, 1622, no. 1072, illustrated).

The painting was for a long period in the collection of the Windham family at Earsham Hall in Norfolk. The house was built in 1704-08 and purchased shortly afterwards by Col. William Windham (1674-1730), the second son of Thomas Windham of Felbrigg, and uncle of William Windham the Younger who remodeled the cabinet rooms at Felbrigg to house the celebrated collection that he had assembled on the Grand Tour. Earsham remained in the Windham family until well into the nineteenth century, and the present painting passed by descent through the family into the twentieth century.