In this work the viewer's eye is led directly from the first, darker plane that includes the figures, through the bridge in the middle, to the little village in the foggy distance. The eldest son of a prominent artistic family in Haarlem, Esaias van de Velde was one of the founders of the school of Dutch landscape painting in the 17th century, which gradually relinquished the idealization of nature in favor of a more realistic approach. Typically, these artists incorporated in their landscapes salient features that made it possible to identify a particular place – the tower of a church, a bridge, a windmill, and so on. They increasingly chose to draw directly from nature, and the level of specific detail in the bridge and village seen here suggests that this landscape was indeed drawn in this way.
