View of Egmond aan Zee

The museum keeps the title in two languages — Utsikt över Egmond aan Zee in Swedish and View of Egmond aan Zee in English. The panel was painted about 1648 and measures 31 × 35 cm; the museum measures the frame it keeps it in at 51 × 55 × 7 cm. Egmond aan Zee is a fishing village on the North Sea coast of North Holland, and the museum dates its account of the picture to the years just before the painter left Haarlem.

Jacob van Ruisdael (about 1628–1682) was born in Haarlem, the son of the frame-maker and painter Isaack van Ruisdael and the nephew of Salomon van Ruysdael, and he was admitted to the Haarlem Guild of St Luke in 1648 — the year this panel is given to. He travelled in Germany and along the eastern Dutch border around 1650, settled in Amsterdam about 1656, and over three decades painted the windmills, bleaching fields, woodland roads and heavy seas that made him the most widely imitated landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age; his work was already being copied and forged in his own lifetime. The painting is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.