Salomon van Ruysdael, 'A View of Deventer seen from the North-West', 1657

Three small boats head up river, towards the rising sun. Their taut, curved sails are outlined against a cool, luminous sky as they lean with the wind. Moving clouds reveal a patch of intense blue that is reflected silvery grey on the translucent water below.

Van Ruysdael’s poetic vision of the three thrusting sails seems to turn the journey through a flat, prosaic Dutch landscape into an epic voyage, like those of the great merchant ships of the time. The boats are kaags, small flat-bottomed vessels intended for inshore sailing. They often carried goods but were also sometimes used as ferryboats, as these are. People are packed in tightly on the three craft. They are bundled up warmly against the chill but would have been well used to travelling on the water, the main means of transport in seventeenth-century Holland.

Cattle wade up to their knees by the far bank, with a single white animal picked out in the growing light. Close to us, the corks of the dragnet held by a fisherman in a rowing boat midstream bob on the water. The curving net is attached to the side of the vessel beached on the grassy slip of land on the right; van Ruysdael’s signature is just discernible on one of its wooden slats. Its lone fisherman is surrounded by huge woven containers ready to take their catch. One basket already floats in the river to keep the fish alive and cool when the sun reaches full height.

Although Deventer is quite a way from the sea, the River Ijssel is wide here. Seen through the early morning mist, the city’s buildings are hazy. A close look reveals that they are painted in some detail, but van Ruysdael has painted them in positions slightly different to those they occupy in reality for the sake of the rhythmic flow of the composition. Among the windmills on the left is the sturdy round tower of the Noordenbergtoren; to the right is the high, triple-tiered tower of the Grote Kerk. Between them, but a little further away, are the twin spires of the Bergh Kerk. Distant white sails cluster at the entrance to the Vischpoorte, where fishing boats once unloaded their catch for market.

Van Ruysdael was one of a group of Dutch artists who, in the early seventeenth century, pioneered the painting of naturalistic scenes with vast skies; like Jan van Goyen and others, he restricted his palette to a range of greens, greys and blues. They depicted what they saw but, at the same time, captured the essence of the Dutch landscape. Van Ruysdael painted mostly river scenes like this one and A River with Fishermen drawing a Net, while van Goyen ventured further, depicting scenes at the coast, like An Estuary with Fishing Boats and Two Frigates.