A river landscape with a ferry and fishermen

Holland’s busy inland waterways provided unending appeal for Salomon van Ruysdael and his contemporaries. As early as the first part of the 1630s, Ruysdael began to employ the ferryboat as a repoussoir device in his compositions, its visual prominence frequently balanced by a large group of trees placed opposite it in the middle ground. The carefully rendered dwellings along the riverbank and various vessels on the water elegantly recede to guide the viewer’s eye from the composition’s shaded foreground to its sunlit horizon. A gradual shift in Ruysdael’s palette unfolded throughout the 1640s, manifested here by an increased brightness and strength of color, in contrast to his almost monochromatic tonalist works of the 1620s and 1630s.