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The painting is signed at bottom right with monogram.
Jacob van Ruisdael followed in the footsteps of his uncle, Salomon, and became a landscape painter; indeed, he was one of the most prolific and important of Dutch landscape painters. His range of subjects was wider than that of his uncle and of Dutch landscape painters in general. He depicted the rather gloomy dunes and flat, green fields as well as towns, forest scenes and waterfalls; he painted a Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of a town, fishing boats at sea, tracts of marshland with trees and views of seaports, always finding the manner most suited to a particular theme, time of day, kind of weather or type of landscape. No other artist has matched the susceptibility with which he interpreted the peculiar atmospheric phenomena of the Netherlands. Unlike the Italian and French landscape painters, Ruisdael followed the practice of Dutch masters in always painting the real inhabitants of a particular landscape - for him the countryside was a setting for human beings, not mythical heroes. The farmsteads nestling among the trees housed Dutch peasants, on the fishing boats Dutch fishermen are seen earning their daily bread, and it is not disguised Greek deities but shepherds who are seen minding the sheep.
From 1656 on Ruisdael worked in Amsterdam, and this was the period when he painted the picture in Budapest - a view of the Binnenamstel, with a sandy road meandering by the water's edge, and a rosy church spire, the tower of the Zuiderkerk, rising high above the city.
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