An extensive landscape with travellers halting at a farmhouse, a village beyond

A roadside tavern sits nestled amidst trees and shrubs in a dune landscape. A coach, crowded with passengers, has halted nearby and is surrounded by villagers. The barefooted woman, with her child on her back and conversing with an elegantly dressed man, is probably a gypsy. An aristocratic couple on horseback, the woman wearing a black travel mask, and two servants with dogs have just returned from a hunting party. A horse, that carries a roebuck and other game, drinks water from a basin near the well. Meanwhile a caravan with a horseman, a coach and two shepherds driving their flock of cows approaches the hamlet. The rooftops of the houses and the wavering leaf-laden branches of the trees are silhouetted against the overcast sky. Beyond, the borders of a city are visible.

Although born in Naarden, he was active in Haarlem for his entire career. Salomon van Ruysdael was one of the leading masters of the tonal landscape. His first recorded painting dates to 1626 and only two years later the chronicler Samuel van Ampzing already mentioned him in his description of Haarlem. Ruysdael's earliest works are still inspired by the pioneering landscapes of Esaias van de Velde, but by the early 1630s Salomon was painting landscape views in a style distinctly his own. Limiting his palette to earth colours, his rural landscapes convey the unadorned beauty of the countryside with great emphasis on sensitively rendered atmospheric effects.

The Szépmüvészeti Muzeum in Budapest and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin each preserve Ruysdael's earliest diagonally orientated dune landscapes of a country road and a coach near a house that sits between trees.1 In these paintings, both dated 1631, Ruysdael explores The Halt before the Inn that would become one of his most favourite motifs. During the early 1640s Ruysdael painted his most beautiful variations on this theme, which are marked by a sophisticated compositional design. The present painting, executed on a flawless panel of oak, is a brilliant example and can be compared to Ruysdael's Halt before the Inn in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, which also dates to 1643.

Contemporary viewers would immediately have recognized the present scene during spring. The artist represents the season with details such as the silvery, young foliage of the trees and the cattle drive.2 It is not entirely clear whether Ruysdael intended to depict a real location. The design of the church in the right distance bears a strong resemblance to the church of Monster, in the province of South-Holland. As far as is currently known there are no other paintings by Ruysdael, showing this village.3


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1 P. C. Sutton (ed.), Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, exhibition catalogue (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art), 1987, p. 468, 169, ills.
2 By custom, cattle drives were held in spring. See for this: Sutton 1987, p. 470, 471.
3 The suggestion that Ruysdael could have depicted the church of Monster, was put forward in a letter by Ellis Dullaart of the RKD, The Hague, which accompanies the painting.