Moonlit Landscape with a View of the New Amstel River and Castle Kostverloren

Aert van der Neer was the great specialist in moonlight of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and this panel is one of his finest. Its full title is Moonlit Landscape with a View of the New Amstel River and Castle Kostverloren. Painted around 1647, it is oil on a wood panel about 57.5 by 89.9 centimeters, and belongs to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

What you are looking at

A river runs from the foreground into the distance, flat and still. On the left bank, a dark wood of tall trees fills almost half the picture, with a cottage and fences half hidden in the shadows. In the center distance, beyond the water, rises a group of buildings with a tall, square tower: Kostverloren, a castle on the Amstel just outside Amsterdam, here seen as a pale silhouette among trees.

The moon hangs to the right of center, a small, brilliant disc partly veiled by drifting clouds. Its light catches the edges of a great bank of white cloud that billows up behind the castle, and falls in a silvery path across the river toward us. A few stars are pricked into the dark sky at the top.

On the right bank, a boat is pulled up by a leaning tree, and two small figures stand at the far right. In the foreground, reeds and broken stumps are silhouetted against the shining water.

How it was made

Van der Neer built his night scenes in a narrow range of warm browns and grays, with one strong light source. He painted the sky and clouds first, then the dark masses of land and trees over them, and finally the reflections and highlights, scratching into wet paint in places to catch the glints of moonlight. The low horizon gives most of the panel to the sky, as in other Dutch landscapes of the period.

The artist

Aert van der Neer was born in Gorinchem around 1603 and spent his career in Amsterdam, where he died in 1677. He seems to have started painting relatively late, and for a time he also ran a tavern; he went bankrupt in 1662 and died poor. His son Eglon van der Neer became a successful painter of elegant interiors, represented in our catalogue by Judith. Aert's moonlit rivers and winter scenes were later prized by collectors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Where to see it

The painting is in the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, Los Angeles. For more night painting, see Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee, our Baroque collection, and the Aert van der Neer page.