Wooded Landscape with a Dead Tree

Like many Haarlem landscape painters, Wynants was inspired by the dunes near to his native city. His large dune paintings are often conceived in deliberately contrasting masses, arranged on either side of a road leading into the picture. The bold placement of the large gnarled tree and the fallen tree trunk in the foreground in the present painting are a reminder of the solemn atmosphere of Jacob van Ruisdael’s work. Wynants’s treatment of the sandy road and dunes and his penchant for large gnarled trees stem from landscapes executed in the late 1640s and early 1650s by Ruisdael and Philips Wouwerman.