View of Dordrecht from the North

Jan van Goyen

National Gallery of Art

More than two dozen rowboats and sailboats bustle around a waterway in this horizontal landscape painting. Beige-colored water gently ripples across the bottom of the composition and extends into the deep distance, where buildings, windmills, and a church line the low horizon. Clouds with warm white tops and cool gray bottoms tower across a pale blue sky, which takes up the top three-quarters of the composition. A few reeds poke out of the water close to us, near the lower right corner of the painting. The row- and sailboats just beyond are packed with people. Two flags fly from the masts of the largest ship, which is to our left of center. One flag has red stripes flanking a white stripe, and the other is striped with red, white, and blue. Two rowboats have pulled up to the grassy shore of a spit of land to our left. A ladder leans against the steep hill rising from the water’s edge, and a cluster of spindly trees lean toward the water from the hillock. The people all wear clothing and hats in tones of brick red, ochre yellow, sable brown, and black. More boats move through the water back to the town and waterways to either side.