Joris van der Haagen, 'A River Landscape', probably about 1650-60

A quiet river meanders through thinly wooded countryside towards a distant, misty horizon, almost shielded from view by a low hill. The clear water catches the cool evening light, and the gnarled trunks of the trees close to us give a sense of age and permanence. But overhead the leaves are turning brown – some branches are already bare – and the light is low, casting long shadows, as autumn brings an inevitable change.

It takes a moment or two to notice the figures in the picture. A small group of travellers rests under the trees on the river bank. Their donkey leans down to drink, laden with their ware. In his basket are the few touches of bright colour in the picture. With an infinitesimal stroke of white, van der Haagen picks out two dim figures on the open grass in the distance, the last of the sun glancing off the back of one of them as he faces the other in close conversation. Further along the river bank, a man places a hand on the shoulder of a fisherman – perhaps he’s been out of luck today. Close to us, almost hidden in the shadows, three goats lie in the long grass. Bright eyes alert, they're ready to run at the first sign of danger.

Dutch landscapes of the mid-seventeenth century were largely divided into two styles. One was favoured by artists who had spent time in Italy: their work is suffused in a soft, gold light and a feeling of warmth and serenity. The other was more concerned with the cooler, Northern light of the Dutch Republic and its native flora and scenery. The newly affluent middle classes lived mainly in towns and cities that seemed to grow larger almost daily. And landscape painting was beginning to be more naturalistic than it had been; earlier views were largely panoramic. The new style reminded them of familiar scenes, perhaps of their childhood, or of walks in the countryside in their leisure time.

Van der Haagan lived in The Hague. He painted mainly landscapes, preferring the hillier parts of the eastern Republic towards Arnhem, Cleves and Maastricht as his theme. He used the dark, muted colours of his great contemporary, Jacob van Ruisdael, to evoke an often heavily wooded landscape with a river and a few figures to give it life, but without Ruisdael’s sense of the drama of nature.

These pictures, however naturalistic they seem, were not painted outdoors. Oil paints needed to be mixed and sometimes the pigments ground in the studio. Not until the invention of the squeezable tube in the mid-eighteenth century was it practical to paint in the open. Watercolour sketches could be made, but artists largely depended on drawings. Van der Haagen made studies of trees in grey wash and black chalk on white or blue paper, and also made panoramas, harking back to a previous era.

To us, the sense of distance and calm is perhaps restful and reassuring. In his time, van der Haagen’s River Landscape would also have been a thoroughly modern picture, showing a freshness and immediacy that not long before would have been quite unusual in the practice of landscape painting.