Scholarly Article

Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century: Landscape, c. 1670

Part of Online Edition: Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century

Publication History

Published online

We look across a river and slightly up at a pair of tall, leafy trees framed by steely-gray clouds against a a vivid blue sky in this nearly square landscape painting. A spindly trunk with only a few leafy branches grows near the towering trees, which are at the center of the picture, and a band of dark green trees grows along the river beyond them. The river runs toward us from the distance to our right into the lower left corner of the canvas, tumbling down a low waterfall near the bottom center of the painting. The river is lined with caramel-brown boulders. A woman and small child walk away from us on a footbridge spanning the river, to our left. The woman wears a white cap and apron, a dark bodice over a white shirt, and a red skirt. She carries the handle of a large basket hooked over her right forearm and the child, wearing a tan hat and jacket and brown pants, walks on her opposite side. A white dog near the woman seems to have paused to look into the forest. The horizon of the river comes about a quarter of the way up the composition so the trees, sky, and clouds fill most of the painting. The artist signed the painting as if he had written his name on a rock to the left of center: “J v Ruisdael.”
Jacob van Ruisdael, Landscape, c. 1670, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.85

Entry

In this landscape Ruisdael has depicted a view across a small waterfall that transforms a smoothly flowing river into a turbulent stream. As the water rushes toward the lower left foreground it passes under a wooden bridge that is traversed by a mother and child and their dog. The path they follow enters a densely forested, somewhat hilly terrain, passing by three large oak trees that dominate the center of the composition. One of these trees is almost dead, and another has a dramatically broken branch hanging precariously over the falls.

Ruisdael often composed his scenes to limit the viewer’s easy access into the landscape. In this painting the land across the river can be reached only by way of the bridge, but the juncture of the bridge and the near shore does not occur within the picture. The effect is to make the landscape unapproachable and forbidding, a mood intensified by the dense forest on the far shore and the steel gray clouds overhead. As in Ruisdael’s painting The Jewish Cemetery and his Forest Scene, the juxtaposition of dead and broken trees with a stream flowing turbulently through a rocky landscape is probably an allegorical reference to the transience of life.

Despite Ruisdael’s compositional schema and the presence of these allusions to metaphysical elements, the mood of the painting is less ominous than in comparable scenes. In large part the difference is one of scale. Not only is the painting relatively small, but also the forms themselves are not as massive and overpowering as in, for example, the Forest Scene. The landscape elements, moreover, are delicately painted. The branches of the trees are not formed with the contorted rhythms of those in Ruisdael’s paintings from the early part of his career. Nuances of light on the leaves and branches of the trees are softly indicated with deft touches of the brush. These qualities, consistent with those of Ruisdael’s later period, suggest that he probably executed this work around 1670, when he turned from the turbulent, vertical waterfall scenes of the preceding decade to more peaceful compositions in a horizontal format.

Ruisdael often adapted and modified motifs from one work to another. A landscape with a similar waterfall occurs in a painting of almost identical dimensions, also dated around 1670, that was formerly in a private collection in Oklahoma City. The bridge is of a type found often in his works, for example, in his landscapes in the Frick Collection, New York, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. The figure group on the bridge also appears in a different setting in his Wooded and Hilly Landscape in the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Technical Summary

The picture support is a moderate-weight fabric from which all tacking margins have been removed in the process of lining. The surface of the fabric was prepared to receive paint with a thin, cream-colored ground over which a grayish brown imprimatura, sparsely pigmented and transparent, was laid. The landscape is modeled with paint applied in moderately thick layers, with slight impasto.

The painting was treated in 2005 to remove discolored varnish and inpainting. The treatment revealed a substantial vertical loss in the sky to the right of the large cloud formation and a significant amount of abrasion surrounding the loss and throughout the sky.