Mountainous Landscape near Düsseldorf  1790

This untamed view of nature anticipates picturesque features of Romanticism. Van Nijmegen, though, was also inspired by 17th-century Dutch painters, such as Jacob van Ruisdael. He had seen the subject of this painting –a landscape with ruins and drovers driving an ox-wagon over a wooden bridge –while travelling along the Rhine in 1788. He described it in his journal.