“A Dune with Figures Resting” is a beautifully orchestrated demonstration of that principle carried on the strength of its brilliant staging of light and shadow in creating drama and energy. It is the beau idéal that collectors of seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes value most, illustrated in this case by a dramatic cloud-driven sky that conveys the essential nature of a blustery day, a rising sandy wedge of land that provides a gently sloping diagonal to a lowered horizon on the left gloriously capped by a silvery band of distanced water, and a landscape populated by figures that have come for the bracing air and together, create a kind of euphoric spectacle of life and living; people admiring the scene just as Salomon van Ruysdael wanted us to admire the picture. It is all pitched and brought to dynamic balance by those wind-driven darkened cumulus clouds that echo and drive the clustered shape of the trees skyward; an effect counter-balanced by patches of white clouds that sort of speak to the strongly lit area that irradiates and transfigures the landscape at mid-ground. The overall effect is a radiant one, and it is clear, Salomon took the advice given by Karel van Mander to painters in 1604 that, “above all do not forget to put small figures under tall trees. . . Make the countryside, the town, and the water full of activity, the houses inhabited, and the roads traveled.” “A Dune with Figures Resting” is a picture full of positivism, an embodiment of a benevolent equilibrium of sea and land and air and water – all experienced by people, whether peasant or of a more leisurely class — a show of prosperity and harmony.