Philips Wouwerman, A Stream in the Dunes, with Two Bathers

Far from the soft, rolling sand dunes at many seaside places, those in Wouwerman’s painting are craggy with rocks here and there. The stark outline of the broken fence against the sky seems forbidding, and the house up on the left bank, gable end facing us, seems to shut us out. In a hollow down by the stream a blackened plant struggles up the side of the dune.

Individual parts of the painting listed in this way might make it seem unappealing, but the warm yellows of the softer sand between the rocks and the sensation of the clouds moving away to reveal the dawn light save it from being bleak and uninviting. Even more, the two small figures in the water give the picture a playful air rare in Wouwerman’s dune paintings. These are often full of incident and humour, but don't often show such apparently spontaneous frolicsome moments – and rarely have figures in the open air almost naked (for a comparison, look at A View on a Seashore with Fishwives offering Fish to a Horseman).

Wouwerman lived in Haarlem for the whole of his professional life. He knew the dunes between the town and the nearby sea well, and painted them often. Even so, he added imaginary details, such as the distant high hill in the distance, to this picture. The white streak on top presumably represents chalky soil, although it looks almost like snow. We are meant to suppose that the sea is just around the corner of the stream. Wouwerman often used the device of a triangular piece of land, looking rather like a cut-out piece of scenery on a stage, jutting into a space to give the picture depth – as he did here. He painted the shifting sand with a light impasto (paint applied roughly and left slightly proud of the support) so it looks as if it is trickling down the slope of the dune.

This is not the cool Northern sky to be expected over a Dutch scene. The warm light is borrowed from the work of artists who had returned from visits to Rome to paint landscapes with softly lit, radiant skies. Wouwerman managed a happy marriage between the two styles, softening the tough Dutch realism but not overstating the golden glow of the Italianate style, to produce paintings – mainly of landscapes but also of battle scenes – which were extremely successful in his own time.