'Hero Painting'

I can't think of anything that so minimally, so simply and so poetically captures a sublime notion of what a landscape can be. There are figures, there are incidental details in this work, but as an abstraction of - as it were - the flat Dutch landscape, and at the same time as a sublime abstraction that captures an actuality... I don't know whether this exists. I suspect not. It's an invented composition and yet it's so powerfully actual, so powerfully resonant that that light, that shadow, that structure resonates right through the centuries.

It's a tale not told by an idiot but painted by a genius that conveys a fantastic sense of what a pinnacle a painting can reach. These landscapes that Koninck made convey a sense of what you can do with oil paint, on canvas, in conveying a common, homogenous visual sensation of what it's like to be in a place - and this painting has it all.

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