Dutch school of the 17th century."View of Amsterdam".Oil on canvas.Measurements: 107 x 149 cm.In the present canvas the painter offers us a view of Amsterdam that combines in a balanced way the local tradition of the genre with the Italian influence, a determining factor in the development of a whole school of landscape painting in Baroque Holland. Thus, we see a naturalistic landscape that hides an ideal, rational treatment of space, which recreates and corrects reality to reflect an emotional and beautiful image that remains firmly rooted, however, in reality. This distinctly Dutch aesthetic is combined with a classical composition and a pearly atmosphere, frozen in time, revealing a clear Italian influence. The result is a navy of luminous grayish and pearly tones on a gentle swell. The light tinged by the leaden atmosphere bathes the sea. Different boats arrive at the coast, carrying merchants and sailors from different social classes. Pure seascapes like the one presented here were a reflection of Holland's powerful foreign trade and large naval fleet.Of all the contributions made by northern European countries to the history of art, none has achieved the enduring importance and popularity of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. The works of Avercamp, Van Goyen, and Ruysdael, among many others, evoke the outlines, terrains, and atmospheres of the Netherlands more vividly than any other place, large or small, has ever been depicted. Within this tradition, the most revolutionary and enduring Dutch landscape contribution has surely been its naturalism. Seventeenth-century Dutch painters were the first to create a perceptually real and seemingly comprehensive image of their land and people. Although landscape as an independent genre appeared in Flanders in the 16th century, there is no doubt that this type of painting only reached its full development among Dutch artists. It can be said that it was practically they who invented the naturalistic landscape, which they affirmed as an exclusively central feature of their artistic heritage. There is no doubt that the Dutch painter, filled with pride for his land, knew how to show through his paintings the beauty of its vast plains and overcast skies, the regular layout of its canals and meandering rivers, its polders and dikes, its beaches and, of course, its spectacular stormy seas. Despite their naturalism or the inventorial record of fact, Dutch landscapes were at least as much a product of imagination as of observation. The Dutch vision of reality, almost as literal as photography, does not so much trace the contours or examine the topography of its surroundings as it naturally selects and reshapes nature to present it in an exemplary way.