Wijnants (c.1625-85) here depicts the remote, infertile and ‘unreconstructed’ geography of the dunes, with twisting paths, broken fences, and undrained meres. Though only a generic evocation, these look like the inland dunes in Het Gooi and the ‘Bad-Lands’ beyond, rather than the so-called ‘Young Dunes’, a strip along the coast of Holland. This land is fit for nothing but shooting and hawking; the mounted huntsman in red has just released a falcon and his assistant rushes over with a ‘lure-pole’.

Wijnants was born in Haarlem, though he had moved to Amsterdam by 1660. His artistic milieu is also suggested by the artists whom he employed to furnish figures for his landscapes: Adriaen van de Velde, Johannes Lingelbach and Philips Wouwermans. The figures in this case appear to be by Adriaen van de Velde, rather than Wouwermans as proposed in 1819. Wijnants’s landscape style is formed on that of Jacob van Ruisdael, though he lightens Ruisdael’s sombre tones, intensifies his colours and makes something more ornamental out of his dramatically gnarled forms. Here, this strong sense of ‘crinkled’ design informs the patterns of the trees, dunes, tufts of grass, broken branches and even the rutted mud of the track. In his distinctive version of this visual language Wijnants may also have been influenced by East Asian landscapes, or imagined 'Oriental' forms derived from them, which he would have known through the import of porcelain from China by the Dutch East India Company and its imitation in contemporary Delftware.

Signed lower left: 'J Wijnants'