Jacob van Ruisdael
(1628 - 1682) |
|
Landscape, Secular Narratives, Historical Narratives, Animals Art Work
| Name: |
Jacob van Ruisdael |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Haarlem |
| Nationality: |
Dutch |
| Birth: |
1628 |
| Death: |
1682 |
| Website: |
|
| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
|
|
Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Landscape, Secular Narratives, Historical Narratives, Animals |
| Medium: |
|
| Method: |
|
| Style: |
|
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
|
|
|
Biography
| Acknowledged as the greatest Dutch baroque interpreter of landscape, Jacob van Ruisdael brilliantly balanced specific landscape details with universal concerns. He lifted the often-humble art of landscape to the grand level usually reserved for history painting, embedding deeply felt philosophical and poetic associations into his portrayals of nature. Fascinated with nearly every aspect of nature, Jacob tackled all but two of the categories of landscape established by Wolfgang Stechow: dunes and country roads, panoramas, rivers and canals, woods, winter scenes, beaches, marine scenes, town views, imaginary scenes, and nocturnes, eschewing only Italianate landscape and most foreign views. Undoubtedly his imaginary scenes and panoramas are his most celebrated achievements, balancing as they do the specific with the general, finding the marvelous tension between reality and artifice that marks all great painting. Baptized in Haarlem, the son of Isaak van Ruisdael, Jacob was born into a family of artists that included not only his father but his uncle. We know that the family members spelled the name variously, but that Jacob himself always spelled it "Ruisdael." He studied with his father as well as with his uncle Salomon van Ruysdael.' Little else of his training is documented. But we do know something of his father's circumstances. From 1628 to 1648 an extensive record of litigation against Isaak points to constant financial worries, which Jacob evidently attempted to alleviate early on. In 1646, when he was merely sixteen or seventeen years old, Jacob was already signing independent pictures and two years later he was enrolled in the Haarlem painters' guild. Arnold Houbraken,* from whom we have our earliest biographical account, notes that Jacob "remained single to the end of his life, men say in order the better to be able to support his old father." More puzzling is Houbraken's account that Jacob studied medicine. Recent scholarship has uncovered the name of Jacobus Ruisdael among the doctors who received medical degrees at Caen on 15 October 1676, lending some credibility to Houbraken's report (which, until recently, most scholars had discounted). Whether or not Ruisdael was a physician as well as a painter remains unresolved. Jacob enjoyed travel early on; we have evidence from paintings, drawings, and notes from other artists that he made excursions during the 1640s to areas such as Alkmaar, Egmond aan Zee (with its famous castle ruins and abbey church), and the Amstel River, where he saw the Portuguese Jewish Cemetery at Ouderkerk. During the 1650s we know he traveled to the region of the German border, to Bentheim (Westphalia), and south to the province of Utrecht with his friend Claes Berchem.* These trips gave him his subject matter as well as a lasting appreciation of nature's breadth and diversity. Around 1656/7 Ruisdael responded, like many of his fellow landscape painters, to the lure of Amsterdam. A firm date is given by a notice of 14 June 1657, stating that Ruisdael, living at the "Sivere Trompet" on the Beurstraat, near the Dam, announced his intention to be baptized in the Reformed Church, an event that took place a week later in the village of Ankervcen near Naarden. On 15 June 1659, he purchased citizenship in Amsterdam. In a document of one year later, Ruisdael declared that his pupil Meindert Hobbema was of good character and had been his pupil and assistant for several years. The two remained friends - Ruisdael was a witness at Hobbema's marriage in Amsterdam in 1668. Perhaps suffering ill health, Ruisdael drew up a will in 1667, but he lived until 1682. Around. 1670 Ruisdael was living on the south side of the Dam in Amsterdam, above a bookseller's shop owned by Hieronymous Sweerts, who published some of Jacob's etchings. Jacob was evidently not poor, having had sufficient sums to provide for his father. He was not, as has been generally assumed, the Jacob van Ruysdael who died in the Haarlem almshouse on 28 October 1681; that was most likely his cousin, son of Salomon. Instead, Jacob most likely died in Amsterdam on 10 March 1682. He was buried in his native Haarlem on 14 March in St. Bavo's church, whose spire is often seen in his panoramic views. RuisdaePs early work spans the years between 1646 and 1650; it is characterized by a meticulous technique including finely rendered foliage and the kind of subject matter (sand dunes, forest glades, marshes with bushes and trees) that testify to his training with his uncle Salomon. Besides Salomon's influence, Jacob responded to the delicate atmospheric effects of Cornelis Vroom. Among the finest examples of these early landscapes are those in the Hermitage and Munich, as well as his noted Thicket (Paris, Louvre) and the Edge of the Marsh (Budapest, Szepmuvszeti Muzeum). His Landscape with a Cottage (dated 1646, Hamburg, Kunsthalle) and Road in the Dunes (dated 1651, formerly London, E. Slatter) indicate his preference for giving the viewer a low vantage point, looking up into trees etched against the sky. Even in his early pictures Ruisdael demonstrates a vigorous mastery of vegetative forms and trees, as well as an emerging sensitivity to atmosphere-a capacity that would ripen over the years. His work of the 1640s also includes diverse subject matter enabling us to observe Ruisdael's eagerness to tackle the various topics that landscape had to offer. His Landscape with a Windmill (dated 1646, Cleveland Museum of Art) is a beautifully resolved massing of dark plant and architectural forms in the foreground, silhouetted against the sky - a preferred device of the 1640s. Certain examples of Ruisdael's early work, such as his Edge of the Marsh, also known as Oak Tree and Dense Shrubbery at the Edge of a Pond (dated ca. 1646, Budapest, Sz6pmuvdszeti Muzeum), reveals his latent ability to adapt nature to suit a grander, more philosophical scheme. His manner of treating foliage and tree bark either anticipates or responds to the manner of Berchem and Adam Pynacker.* Ruisdael also experimented with panoramas, as his View ofEgmond aan Zee (dated 1646, Eindhoven, the heirs of Mr. and Mrs. Philips-de Jongh) and View of Naarden and the Church of Muiderberg (dated 1647, Lugano, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection) demonstrate. From the slight hesitancy of 1646, Ruisdael quickly assumed full command of his panorama by 1647, giving the subject an epic scale, the sky an animated quality, and the composition an elemental simplicity. Ever the experimenter during these early years, Ruisdael did not hesitate to combine elements of dune scenes, panoramas, and his portrayals of trees. One striking example of such an experiment is his Blasted Elm with a View ofEgpzond aan Zee (dated 1648, Manchester, NH, Currier Gallery of Art). Contrasting a stark close-up view of a gnarled elm (nearly devoid of bark and limbs) with a distant view of Egmond aan Zee, Ruisdael used a dune landscape as the middle ground to form the transition between foreground and background. Here, a measure of artifice compels the onlooker to consider the symbolic meaning behind the alignment of forms, an approach that became one of Ruisdael's richest veins of landscape expression in the next decade. None of Ruisdael's seascapes is dated, but scholars assume these too had entered his repertoire before 1650. A beautiful example, Rough Sea with Sailing Vessels (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum), is generally dated to the late 1640s on the basis of its connections to the work of Jan Porcellis* and Simon de Vlieger.* Occupied in his early years by details and crowding his pictures with them, Ruisdael gained a greater simplicity toward 1650, as the Blasted Elm shows. The transition toward simplicity is evident in his Banks of a River (dated 1649, University of Edinburgh), wherein his motife are once more reductive, isolated, and yet knit together in a strong composition. By the 1650s his compositional structure was increasingly rigorous, imposed on the diverse elements of nature to be included in his pictures. He achieved a kind of "classic" monumentality, a grand sweep in his landscapes that coincides with what is generally acknowledged as the highpoint of much painting in Holland. The experience of his travels with Berchem to the German frontier influenced Ruisdael's work after 1651. Often adding castles, mills, bridges, and other architectural elements to his pictures, Ruisdael reached a new level of nobility, grandeur, and intellectual complexity in this decade. His Castle ofBentheim (dated 1653, Blessington, Ireland, Beit Collection) is one of several views he painted of the castle. Here Ruisdael's grandiose interpretation of nature reaches a high point. Here too we note a new level of artifice, as the area around the castle is contrived to look piauresque and the entire picture is handled with an assured painterly technique. That sense of artifice is noted in many of the pictures dated to 1653. For example, Two Water Mills with an Open Sluice (dated 1653, Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum) has a similar quality of contrivance and staging - a quality that looks forward to the artificiality of Boucher in the following century. More successful and celebrated are Ruisdael's portrayals of magnificent oaks that can be dated to the early 1650s. One particularly striking example is his Great Oak (dated 1652, formerly an anonymous loan to the Birmingham City Art Museum; now in the Carter Collection, Los Angeles) in which the staffage was supplied by his friend Berchem. Adopting his preferred device of silhouetting a massive form against the sky, Ruisdael here concentrates on a single awesome oak, whose scarred branches and trunk are mute yet eloquent testimony to its long endurance against the relentless forces of nature. A mood of isolation, and a sense of the passage of time and the elemental power of nature, also are evoked in his portrayals of ruins that are dated to this decade. Among the most notable are his Landscape with the Ruins of the Castle of Egmond (Art Institute of Chicago), which expresses simultaneously the transience as well as the durability of the human condition. Though undated, Jacob Ruisdael's two famous depictions of The Jewish Cemetery (Dresden, GemSldegalerie Alte Meister; Detroit Institute of Arts) are thematically related to his ruin scenes. Perhaps the most blatantly symbolic and therefore artificially contrived of all his paintings, these visual essays on life and death have become Ruisdael's most famous pictures. Undoubtedly because of their message of human transience, the pictures struck a responsive chord among the Romantics. Goethe described the Dresden picture as "dedicated to the past," as pointing to "a past beyond the past," and Consul Smith (probably in reference to the Detroit version) praised the subject as conveying a great moral lesson. On the other hand, Constable, who loved Ruisdael's work, preferred his less contrived images. Individual responses continue to vary, as do the proposed dates for the paintings, which range from the 1650s to the 1660s and early 1670s. Dated pictures appear infrequently after 1653, making Ruisdael's chronology thereafter less secure. Nonetheless, scholars allude to another shift in Ruisdael's approach during the 1660s. Among the subjects he seemed to prefer at that time were waterfalls, which began to appear in his work after 1660. Evidently responding to the popularity that the subject achieved in the hands of Allan van Everdingen,* Ruisdael began to incorporate waterfalls in his paintings as early as 1659. A number of waterfalls are known, including a forceful depiction in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. Nature's vitality and fecundity are clearly the underlying motives for several pictures from the 1660s. For example, Ruisdael's depictions of undulating grain fields with their windblown trees and rain-soaked clouds are powerful paeans to natural abundance. Among his most striking examples of such themes are his Sunlit Grain Field on the Bank of a Coast (Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen) and the even more famous Grain Fields, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Panoramas also captured his imagination during the 1660s. Beautifully dividing his views between earth and sky, often picking out distant views of cities along the horizon, Ruisdael beautifully evoked the infinite vastness of the sky and alluded to the ever-shifting conditions of weather and daylight. His pantheistic interpretation, in which human existence is in harmony with the greater forces of nature, is nowhere more beautifully expressed than in his marvelous panoramas. A wonderful example is his Landscape with a Ruined Castle and a Village Church (London, National Gallery) wherein the alternating patterns of light and shadow reflect the constantly changing weather as winds pull the clouds across the sky. Inexorable natural cycles are among the many allusions to the passage of time in an image of serene stability. Variously dated by scholars, the National Gallery picture is now placed to the mid- 1660s, coming after numerous other experiments with panoramas, including Extensive Landscape with View of the Town ofOotmarsum (formerly thought to be Beverwijk; now in Munich, Alte Pinakothek). RuisdaePs exploration of panoramas culminated in his views of Haarlem (numbering about fifteen), probably begun by 1669 and mostly executed between 1670 and 1675. These now rank among Ruisdael's best-loved pictures, portraying with seeming simplicity and modesty, the great sweep of the Dutch landscape as it incorporates human life within its vast expanse. Beautiful examples are preserved in The Hague (Mauritshuis) and Zurich (Kunsthaus). Ruisdael's later beach scenes and his winter scenes are also dated to the 1660s and 1670s. A beautiful example is his portrayal of The ZuiAer Zee Coast near Muiden (signed, Polesden Lacy, Dorking, Surrey, National Trust) which shows the beach of the Zuider Zee (now known as the Ijsselmeer) dotted with figures, all dwarfed by the looming sky and the billowing clouds overhead. Clearly connected to his panoramas, these beach scenes link humanity to the infinity of the sky and the vast ness of the ocean in a friendly, hopeful spirit. An even humbler note is struck in Ruisdael's handful of winterscapes datable to the 1660s and 1670s. Often showing windmills and other rustic buildings huddled on a knoll by an ice-covered river, the images concentrate on the blustery winter weather, snow and leaden clouds, and sturdy Dutch citizens going about their business. The Fondation Custodia in Paris preserves a charming example, as does the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Less appealing are Ruisdael's occasional depictions of various specific architectural subjects that date to these years. Such pictures d&A Park with Fountains and a Country House (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art) and Panoramic View of the Amstel Looking toward Amsterdam (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum) lack the romantic feeling that enlivens so many of Ruisdael's best works. But one of his most famous pictures seems in fact to be a portrait of a specific edifice, albeit a humbler one: The Mill at Wijk (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum) displays all that is best in Ruisdael, evoking as it does human existence within the great context of nature-dwarfed by nature, yet in complete harmony with it. A poet of nature and of humanity's place in it, Ruisdael became the well-spring for much later landscape painting, particularly in England. Avidly collected there from the 1740s on, Ruisdael is perhaps better represented in England than in any other country. Although he enjoyed high prices, Ruisdael was not as popular as the Italianate landscape painters in his lifetime; and during the eighteenth century, although he was held in high esteem, he was still eclipsed by Berchem, Wouwerman,* and others. He gained his present-day stature with the rise of Romanticism. With the revived interest in naturalistic landscape advocated by Rousseau and Constable, for example, Ruisdael came to be recognized as one of the greatest interpreters of landscape who ever lived. Goethe, Jacob Burckhardt, Eugene Fromentin, and Wilhelm von Bode were among his many champions, and Romantic painters frequently paid homage to him in their paintings. |
Samples of Work
|
|
