Calm water, plump cows, scudding clouds, and a whirling windmill: what could be more Dutch than this tranquil scene? The peaceful mood is reinforced by the artist's reliance on horizontal lines and rectilinear masses ranged across the picture plane. The red jacket of the standing figure provides a brilliant pictorial accent. Across the Waal River rises the Valkhof, a medieval citadel adjoining the city of Nijmegen, once the home of the ancient hero Claudius Civilis, who led the native Batavians in revolt against imperial Rome. This view would have filled Cuyp's contemporaries, who had recently won their independence from Spain, with nostalgia and patriotic pride. The distant windmill, lit by the morning sun, was a modern technological marvel, useful for pumping water or grinding grain.
Cuyp based this landscape on eyewitness sketches of the site, which he visited in 1652, but he transformed the typically gray Dutch atmosphere with a warm, Italianate glow. Although Cuyp never traveled to Italy, the adoption of sunny, southern light effects is a hallmark of his style. It may reflect the influence of Jan Both, whose Scene in the Roman Campagna of about 1647-48 is also in the IMA's collection of Dutch paintings. Cuyp's work, in turn, had a profound impact on 19th-century landscape painters, including J.M.W. Turner, who journeyed to Holland to walk in his footsteps.
[O]ne can distinguish in his pictures the misty sunrise from bright noontime, and these in turn from saffron-colored sunset.
-Painter Arnold Houbraken, 1718
