The halt at the inn

Salomon van Ruysdael was a leading Dutch landscape painter of the seventeenth century and the uncle of the even more acclaimed landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael, whom he probably trained. Born in Naarden, near Amsterdam, van Ruysdael relocated to Haarlem with his brother Isaack following their father’s death in 1616. Along with Jan van Goyen, he pioneered a monochromatic approach to riverine landscapes in the 1630s.

This is the largest surviving painting by Ruysdael, and it demonstrates his masterful use of restricted tones, his broad handling of paint and the manipulation of powerful complementary diagonals, such as the swoop of the clouds and the leaning stand of trees in the centre. A number of the figures in the foreground were added at some later point, probably in England during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, to satisfy contemporaneous tastes for genre details of everyday life.

The halt at the inn was one of the artist’s favourite subjects. As well as being a valuable reminder of the vicissitudes of travelling by river and road in the seventeenth century, it proudly reveals the Dutch countryside to be a place of plenty, with its healthy livestock, burgeoning towns and commodious stopping places, such as this thatched timber inn with its leaning dovecote.

Tony Magnusson, Curator of European Art, 2016–18