A horsepond with bathers was one of Philips Wouwerman’s favourite subjects, and it may have been inspired by the work of Pieter van Laer, as is often the case with his early paintings.6 In this scene one’s eye is immediately caught by the riderless animal in the centre, with the white part of its coat standing out against the dark background. It is not a palfrey, like in The Grey,7 but a jennet, a fiery Spanish/Berber breed.8 It is being led on a bridle, but it cannot be reined in entirely, for it is standing on its forelegs and is lashing out with its hind legs, turning its head as it does so and showing the white of its eye. It may be reacting to the boy with the whip behind it. Its bucking action is accentuated with a strategically placed highlight on its rear left hoof.9 Wouwerman was a painter of horses with few equals, but this picture shows that he was no less a master of cloudscapes. The sky takes up roughly two-thirds of the composition, with dark grey clouds massing together against the bright blue beyond. The painting should be dated to the first half of the 1650s.10 It seems that Wouwerman had now shaken off the influence of Pieter Cornelisz Verbeeck, Pieter van Laer and Isack van Ostade that had informed his early work. One characteristic of the style that he was gradually developing is the way in which he places figures against a contrasting background. Houbraken had already mentioned this ‘artful distribution of light objects against dark, and then dark against light’ as one of the distinctive aspects of Wouwerman’s oeuvre.11 Little is known about the way in which Wouwerman put his compositions together. Several early works like the Battle Scene dated 1647 in Karlsruhe have visible underdrawings,12 but this does not appear to have been his standard method, for none were revealed with infrared photography in any of his pictures in the Rijksmuseum. Both the paucity of preliminary drawings and the structure of his paintings, in which some of the figures were reserved and some were added over the background, certainly suggest that he conceived at least part of his compositions while he was actually working on them. Here, too, only a few figures were completely reserved. This is the first painting by Wouwerman that the Rijksmuseum bought. The reputation that he enjoyed in the early nineteenth century is illustrated by the fact that it was also one of the first works to be chosen for inclusion in the album of reproductive engravings titled De Bataafsche Kunstgallerij (The Batavian Art Gallery). Reinier Vinkeles made a print after it for that purpose in 1805.13 Gerdien Wuestman, 2022 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements