A river estuary with sailboats and fishermen pulling in nets, a fortified castle and horse-drawn wagon on the bank

Wolfgang Stechow (loc. cit.) noted that the present painting may well be the pendant to another work of similar scale, dated 1664, and likewise recorded in the collection of Count Holstein at Holsteinborg Castle in 1710 (Stechow, op. cit., no. 384; sold Sotheby’s, London, 13 December 2001, lot 7). In his late paintings, as here, Ruysdael eschewed his earlier tonal tendencies in favour of a colourful palette and monumental design that was consistent with the then-fashionable ‘classical’ phase of Dutch landscape painting.