Landscape with a town in the middle distance

This painting was formerly attributed to the foremost landscape painter of the latter half of the seventeenth century, Jacob van Ruisdael, in a Museum catalogue of 1893. However as Michael Kauffmann noted in his Catalogue of Foreign Paintings (London: 1973) the ‘painting is so badly rubbed and so extensively repainted that an attempt at attribution would seem impossible’. Nonetheless, the general composition of the painting is in keeping with the style of landscape produced by Dutch painters throughout the seventeenth century. The only area of the painting to retain its original character is the lower-left foreground, which appears to show some of the contrasts of light typical of Ruisdael’s work, which marked a departure from the tonal landscapes of the earlier seventeenth century.