An extensive river landscape with a port and mountains and a castle beyond

Born in Rotterdam to an otherwise unknown painter of the same name, Herman Saftleven trained with his father in his native town before moving to Utrecht in 1632. In May of the following year he married and purchased a house near the city’s St. Pieterskerk, where he resided for the remainder of his life. Saftleven became a member of Utrecht’s painters' guild in 1654, purchased citizenship in the city in 1659 and held various positions in the guild between 1655 and 1667. As a sign of his success, Saftleven enjoyed the patronage of Alethea, wife of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, and organized the sale of a portion of the Earl’s collection in Utrecht in 1662. He was buried in the Buurkerk in Utrecht on 5 January 1685.

In the early 1650s, Saftleven embarked upon the first of several trips through the Rhineland. The region’s hilly landscape cut by river valleys made a lasting impression on the artist, who returned to it in small-scale, exquisitely rendered topography for the remainder of his career. These poetic and refined depictions of the Rhineland established Saftleven as one of the most original landscapists of the Dutch Golden Age and earned him the praise of contemporaries like the poet Joost van den Vondel, who penned several panygerics on Saftleven’s work and described him as the ‘geachten Rijnstroomschilder’ (‘esteemed Rhine river painter’).

The catalogue of the 1999 sale of this painting records that Dr. Wolfgang Schulz endorsed the attribution at that time.