View of Egmond-on-the-Sea

View of Egmond-on-the-Sea of 1648, now at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, was painted when Van Ruisdael was around nineteen in one of his earliest topographically specific landscapes. The small town of Egmond on the North Holland coast, dominated by its ruined abbey that stood above the dunes, had particular historical significance — the abbey of Egmond was one of the oldest in the Netherlands, founded in the tenth century, and its ruins introduced the historical transience theme that would recur throughout Van Ruisdael's career. The Currier Museum, a distinguished regional art museum in New Hampshire, holds this as one of its primary Dutch Golden Age works, demonstrating the wide geographic dispersal of Van Ruisdael's paintings through international collecting over three and a half centuries.

The composition presents a characteristic Ruisdael panorama: a wide horizontal prospect viewed from a slightly elevated position, dominated by an active sky. The abbey ruins are treated as compositional monuments against the pale sky. Dune vegetation and the first beach structures frame the lower field, with warm, raking light illuminating the ruins.