Leonardus Raphael van den Braakartist • painterDen Bosch 1823-1870 Arnhem

Van den Braak was born in 1823 in Den Bosch. He has mainly made a name for himself as a photographer, which is why he is less known as a painter. In the period in which this painting was created (1857), he lived and worked in Rotterdam. In this landscape with a hunter, shepherd and other rural people, a timber raft is depicted that transported tree trunks via the Rhine from Germany to the Netherlands. Such a raft could be 400 meters long, 60 meters wide and 2.5 meters thick. Small houses were built on these rafts in which the workers camped for a few months, a number that could reach up to 500 people.