A landscape dominated by monumental trees, giving way to a meandering river and fields at left. At right, a man on horseback makes his way along a dirt road towards a mother and child, in the clearing at right a thatched building serves as a rural church, as indicated by the cross inscribed on its door. This canvas is painted in the style of Jacob van Ruisdael, regarded as the principal figure among Dutch landscape painters of the second half of the 17th century. His naturalistic compositions and style of representing massive forms and his colour range constituted a new direction away from the ‘tonal phase’ (ca. 1620–ca. 1650) associated with the previous generation of landscape painters including his uncle Salomon van Ruysdael, Jan van Goyen, Cornelis Vroom, Pieter Molijn. Ruisdael produced several distinct landscape types—mountainous, woodland and river settings, waterfalls, beach and dune scenes, seascapes, panoramas and winter scenes. He was not apparently interested in Italianate landscapes but stands out among contemporaries such as Aelbert Cuyp and Philips Koninck. His oeuvre comprises ca. 700 paintings and ca. 100 drawings, the majority undated. Around 1650–c. 1656, Ruisdael visited the Dutch–German border region, probably with his friend Nicolaes Berchem, and depicted a number of new subjects, such as half-timbered houses and water-mills similar in feeling and tone to 306/307-1864. Pictures of large trees constituted another new development for Ruisdael and The Great Oak of 1652 now in the Los Angeles County Museum, shows how he made a wooded landscape monumental through focusing on a single mighty tree. The two artist's may have even collaborated on the Los Angeles picture, Berchem inserting diminutive figures into Ruisdael's monumental landscape.