Landscape with view on Rhenen

Rhenen was a well-known hilltop town on the Rhine with the distinctive Cunerakerk tower visible for miles across the flat surrounding landscape. Salomon van Ruysdael depicted Rhenen multiple times across his career — it was one of the most painted Dutch topographic subjects of the seventeenth century, depicted by Jan van Goyen, Hercules Seghers, and others — but his treatment in this 1659 canvas, now at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, shows his late mature style at its most assured. The Getty's Dutch collection is one of the strongest in the United States, assembled through major purchases that brought together landmark works across multiple collecting priorities. Rhenen's combination of elevated architecture with flat river panorama made it an ideal subject for demonstrating the pictorial tension between the Dutch landscape's characteristic horizontality and the vertical punctuation of a town skyline.

Canvas of 1659 with Salomon's full late-career atmospheric technique: warm ochre and golden tones in the land, cool grey-blue in the sky, the Rhine reflecting both in a luminous horizontal band. The Cunerakerk tower is rendered with architectural specificity sufficient for identification while remaining subordinate to the atmospheric totality.