The name Jan van Kessel belongs to at least four distinct seventeenth-century painters, a genuine source of confusion that has dogged attribution studies for generations, and the artist represented by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, active in Amsterdam and dated 1641 to 1680, is quite separate from the better-known Antwerp branch of the name descended from the Brueghel family. This Amsterdam Jan van Kessel, the son of the framemaker Thomas Jacobsz van Kessel, trained under the great landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael, and his surviving body of work, some 120 pictures, follows Ruisdael's example closely enough that a number of his paintings were historically attributed to his teacher, in some cases after an authentic van Kessel signature had been deliberately painted over.
Van Kessel specialised in townscapes and panoramic views of Amsterdam and Haarlem, subjects exemplified by his Sluice and the New City Ramparts of Amsterdam in Winter and Bleaching Grounds near Haarlem, and he ranged confidently across the wider repertoire of the Dutch landscape tradition, drawing on the water-mills and villages of his friend Meindert Hobbema, the waterfalls of Allaert van Everdingen, the wooded scenes of Jan Wijnants, and the winter subjects of Jan van de Cappelle. This breadth, combined with the close stylistic proximity to Ruisdael that made his work so easily mistaken for his master's, has left him a somewhat underrated figure even among specialists in Dutch Golden Age landscape painting.
The painting by this Jan van Kessel held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, a wooded landscape, exemplifies the Ruisdael-influenced idiom for which he is chiefly known, and represents a genuine, if historically overshadowed, contribution to the Dutch landscape tradition of the second half of the seventeenth century.