Aug 9, 20216 min read

Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/29 to 1682)

Ruisdael’s Self Portrait

The life of Jacob van Ruisdael still remains somewhat a mystery. All we know for sure is he was a painter. A great landscape artist who stood out among the finest during the classical age of Dutch landscape paintings.

Ruisdael was born in early 17th Century Haarlem. His father Isaac was a painter and tapestry designer. His uncle Salomon van Ruysdael was a landscape painter. Due to their connections with prominent artists of their time such as Jan van Goyen and Esias van de Velde, Ruisdael grew up surrounded by art and with a desire to partake himself.

Ruisdael was born and lived during the Dutch Golden Age. A time of economic prosperity that had never before been experienced by the small nation. Their trade systems across the world had taken great strides and Netherlands was becoming a very global nation, as much as it could in the 17th century. Imports were being made in terms of food and material wealth. There was very little competition at least until 1648 when the Twelve Years War ended with Spain. During this time Rivalries with England and France grew. Due to the trade however throughout the century the middle class was getting very prosperous. Something that in turn helped the cultural prosperity where lots of paintings were being bought and commissioned, not just by the aristocracy. Small households would also have paintings on their walls and paintings of small households have survived as evidence of that. Culturally this was the grand era in Netherlands and Dutch Baroque produced exceptional masters or rather the opposite. Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, Lely and Ruisdael himself, although the most known and revered among their peers, are but a minute speck among the myriad of artists who worked during this time. This was truly a century of magnificent achievements.

Fig.1

Not much is known about the personal life of Jacob van Ruisdael but experts have deduced that he must have trained under and learned from his uncle Ruysdael. Traces of the latter’s influence are little to none yet the similar leaning into Landscape painting could not have been a coincidence. Apart from training in painting it has been found through research, although not confirmed entirely, that he may have also trained as a doctor and did many surgeries in his time. There is however very little evidence to go any further.

His early years in Haarlem were fruitful and he began work very early. All the works that have been found and attributed to Ruisdael are of exceptional quality in terms of skill and execution. This tends to the conclusion that he was a very gifted artist from the very beginning of his career. Something that helped him get into the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke at the very young age of only eighteen. He worked in Haarlem till 1656 at which point he moved to Amsterdam and stayed there for the rest of his life. He died in Amsterdam in 1682 and was buried back in Haarlem.

Fig. 2

With about seven hundred attributed works, Ruisdael must have been a very accomplished artist with a very active work ethic. There has been no shortage of his admirers over the centuries but a few such as Goethe and John Constable stand out. The German literary master Goethe considerd him a master of visual poetry. Someone who could, in his words, ‘animate’ a landscape. Was it Ruisdael’s intention to make it look alive? He surely did everything within his capacity to make them natural. Especially through his use of spacial depth and the play of light and shade over vast expanses of land. His works shock and demand admiration. They stand out. He was truly unlike any other and very good at his work.

Ruisdael’s approach to landscape painting has been one of the most prominent points of study among his admirers. Netherlands is mostly flat land and sea. The dramatic and adventurous seem to lack in plain unhindered stretches of land which are mostly calm and quiet. Dutch landscape artists took this as a given quality of their subject. They painted intimate areas with the focus on something small and nearby. Some object that did not need the vastness of the lands to actively participate in the painting. There was also a very large practise of drawing and painting landscapes indoors. This mostly idealised the Dutch landscape and made it ideal, peaceful. This was mostly a nationalist movement of sorts, a patriotic allegiance to the idealised beauty of their lands. A practise common among the Goyen and his peers in the batches before and during Ruisdael’s time. Specially with the conflict with Spain having come to an end. Ruisdael did not lack national or civic pride as is apparent in his painting (Fig. 1) View of Haarlem with the Bleaching Grounds (1670-5). He did however approach his subjects differently. He chose to improvise scenes of landscapes with new kinds of focus and perspective with huge skies and great clouds. With smaller elements drawing the focus within extensive views of land and mostly sckyscapes. He chose to constantly keep reinventing himself by travelling across the outskirts of Netherlands in search of new places to paint and new ways to paint them. He even embraced the new type of landscape introduced by Allart van Everdingen, rocky mountain scenes with flowing water, torrents and waterfalls. Though according to Houbraken, Ruisdael’s biographer, he far outdid Everdingen. He was familiar with similar compositions before that as well as can be seen in (Fig. 2) Two Watermills and an Open Sluice Near Singraven (1650s).

Fig. 3

Can he be considered a precursor to the Romantic Movement? It began in England where the first industries grew and is mostly given importance as a literary movement headed by the masters such as Wordsworth in the first phase and Keats in the second. In visual culture it is synonymous with Constable and Turner. The Romantic Movement grew out of a need to stand against the destructive artificial forces that grew exponentially during the Industrial Revolution. It chose to aggrandise natural beauty and the enforce a need to preserve it as it was. His depictions of nature are not of conflict between natural and human forces but is a harmony of the two. It shows the power of nature and the perseverance of humanity in spite of it. Nature is triumphant yet humanity has not lost. Then again this whole idea of nature versus the artificial would not have existed in those times as it did during and since the Industrial Revolution. The fact that Constable chose to use landscape painting to do so is not cause enough to incorporate all previous landscape painters into the ‘precursor’ category. True, but there is a connection. Turner is supposed to have been influenced by Ruisdael’s paintings and held him in high regard. So even though the Romantic Movement would have had nothing to do with Ruisdael, his paintings may have had. His admiration of nature must have been inhuman in the best possible way.

Fig. 4

These are secular yet so grand. There seems to be a story, an adventure within each of his paintings. It is not hard to get lost in one of his visual tales, or more precisely the lack of anything direct. They are highly ambiguous and tend to hint at a long history such as in his drawings of the castle of Egmond and the popular painting The Jewish Cemetery (1650s) (Fig. 3). They have within them some fantastic timeless quality that beckons the mind to wander, to imagine them as scenes from a long lost epic. The one painting that comes to mind immediately is Le Coup de Soleil (1670s)(Fig. 4).There has been a lot of discussion on the recurring theme of overwhelming storm clouds and darkness as recurring symbols of the tragic, of sadness and death. To me this feels more like a meditation on the inevitable. The unfathomable. The divine. The paintings feel as if they are prayers to this greater power. Destruction after all has been one of the most widely accepted powers of the divine across most religions. An element I find in both Grainfields (1660s)(Fig. 5) and Vessels in a Breeze (1650s)(Fig. 6). In the latter it truly seems as if something grand is about to occur. Maybe it is the bright gloom of the golden yellow or maybe it is the mood set by the overbearing clouds. It may not have been religious but there was some kind of a religious devotion, probably to the work or even the subject itself.

Fig. 5

However he may have lived, whatever his influences and reasons may have been for doing his paintings, he remains one of the greatest masters of landscapes. A testament to the unrivalled greatness of the Dutch Baroque.