The painting is unfinished; areas of foliage have not been completed. The attribution of this work to Rubens has in the past been doubted, but 'A Wagon fording a Stream' is now considered to be by the artist.
The dating of Rubens's landscapes is problematic because they were not commissioned and so relatively few documents concerning them survive.
This view also appears with slight variations in another landscape by the artist (Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen). It has also been related to a drawing in St Petersburg (Hermitage).
