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Panoramic views of the flat plains in Holland are often said to be the most distinctive contribution of Dutch landscape painting. They differ from the 'world panorama' of earlier Flemish art by seemingly recording the momentary view of a single scene, rather than being composed of a collection of separate visual memories. Formally, they are characterized bb a low horizon line, implying a low viewpoint. Although Ruisdael, perhaps the greatest and the most versatile Dutch landscape specialist, did not invent this type of picture, he became one of its most distinguished practitioners.
This painting may represent a view in Gooiland, a district to the east of Amsterdam; there are, however, at least four other, smaller landscapes by Ruisdael that show the same view or part of it with considerable variations, and it is clear that he was not attempting strict topographical accuracy. Despite the pretence of spontaneity, this work, like all landscape paintings of the time, is a synthetic product of the artist's studio.
Its dominant feature is the sky, to which two thirds of the picture surface is devoted and which is also reflected in the water of the foreground. This is the real, moisture-laden sky of Holland billowing with clouds, the sun breaking sporadically through scattering shafts of light across the countryside - effects which Constable was later to emulate. Almost more remarkable than the truthful record of the shape, density and illumination of the clouds is the illusion that they are moving through space and over our heads (we tend to think that perspective does not govern cloudscapes, but these seem to taper towards the horizon and broaden at the upper edge of the painting). The long horizon too seems to extend beyond the frame, broken only by church spires and the tiny white sails of a windmill. But our sense of inhabiting the landscape is compromised by our viewpoint in relation to the foreground. By letting us look down into the bastion standing below the horizon line, the painter suggests that we are viewing it from some improbably high place, higher also than the shore on which the peasants graze their flock (both figures and animals were painted by Adriaen van der Velde, a division of labour quite common in Dutch landscapes). This implied detachment, however, strengthens the elegiac mood aroused by the sight of overgrown ruins, melancholy reminders of a distant and more heroic past.
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