View of Alkmaar

View of Alkmaar of 1672, now at Upton House in Warwickshire, depicts the North Holland city across its surrounding flat terrain in one of van Ruisdael's later panoramic city views. Alkmaar, famous for its historic cheese market and its successful resistance to Spanish siege in 1573 — the first Dutch victory of the Revolt that would eventually create the Republic — had strong patriotic associations for Dutch viewers. Van Ruisdael's panoramic treatment, with three-quarters of the canvas devoted to a luminous cloud-filled sky, was by 1672 a well-established formula that he had developed and refined over two decades of panoramic landscape practice. Upton House, now a National Trust property, holds a distinguished collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings assembled by Walter Samuel, 2nd Viscount Bearsted, in the twentieth century.

The city's church towers punctuate the flat horizon beneath a dramatic sky. Ruisdael's atmospheric perspective creates convincing distance between the viewer and the distant architecture.