Ruisdael, Jacob van

Ruisdael or Ruysdael, Jacob van (both: yä`kōp vän rois`däl), c.1628–1682, Dutch painter and etcher, the most celebrated of the Dutch landscape painters. He studied with his father Isack and perhaps with his uncle Salomon van Ruysdael, a well-known Haarlem landscapist. He first worked in Haarlem, moveing to Amsterdam in 1656. Late in life, he obtained a medical degree and practiced as a physician. Ruisdael's characteristic work shows northern nature in a somber mood. His dramatic skies are usually overcast, throwing a restless flux of light over the countryside. Gnarled, knotted oak and beech trees are rendered with extraordinary accuracy. Ruisdael's later works show great breadth of stroke, dramatizing humanity's insignificance amid the splendor of nature. Important paintings include Jewish Cemetery (c.1655, Detroit Inst. of Art) and Wheatfields (c.1670, Metropolitan Mus.). He also produced some very fine etchings. Possessed of a romantic sensibility before the advent of romanticism, Ruisdael anticipated and inspired many of the great French and English landscapists of the next two centuries. Of his pupils, Meindert Hobbema was the most outstanding. The Rijks Museum, the National Gallery, London, and many American collections have examples of his work.

Bibliography

See W. Stechow, Dutch Landscape Painting of the Seventeenth Century (1968); S. Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, Drawings, and Etchings (2002) and Jacob Van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape (2005).

---

Ruisdael, Jacob (Isaakszoon) van

 also spelled Ruysdael

(born 1628/29, Haarlem, Neth.—buried March 14, 1682, Amsterdam) Dutch landscape painter. He was probably trained by his father, a framemaker and artist. He was enrolled in the Haarlem painters' guild in 1648 and settled in Amsterdam c. 1656. He was a remarkably versatile artist, and some 700 paintings have been attributed to him. Whereas earlier Dutch artists used trees merely as decorative devices, Ruisdael made them the subject of his paintings and imbued them with forceful personalities through vigorous brushwork and strong colours in the Baroque style. The emotional force of his work is evident in the famous Jewish Cemetery (c. 1660), where three tombstones crumble to ruin amid an ever-renewing nature. His late works include numerous panoramas of the flat Dutch countryside, in which a low, distant horizon is dominated by a vast, clouded sky. He is often considered the greatest Dutch landscape painter of all time.

---

Ruisdael, Jacob van 

Born in 1628 or 1629 in Haarlem; died in 1682 in Amsterdam; buried Mar. 14, 1682, in Haarlem. Dutch painter and graphic artist.

Ruisdael, who probably studied with his uncle S. van Ruysdael, was influenced by the work of P. Potter, J. van Goyen, and H. Seghers. In 1648 he became a master in the guild of Haarlem. Ruisdael’s early works are modest views of Haarlem’s environs (for example, The Small House in the Grove, 1646, Hermitage, Leningrad). From roughly 1650 to 1655, Ruisdael traveled throughout eastern Holland and western Germany. During his period abroad he painted a number of dramatic landscapes, including The Jewish Cemetery (Dresden Picture Gallery; variant in the Detroit Institute of Arts).

Ruisdael settled in Amsterdam circa 1656. In his mature period he painted urban, rural, river, and sea views (for example. The Millage of Egmond aan Zee, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; Windmill at Wijk, 1661, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). He also painted Norwegian mountain landscapes (Waterfalls, Mauritshuis, The Hague) and scenes of thickets along marshes and forest streams (The Marsh, Hermitage). His Norwegian landscapes are reminiscent of the works of A. Everdingen. Precise line and palpable form are combined in these works with an exquisite rendering of aerial perspective and a play of light and shadow. Ruisdael’s colors are marked by subtle gradations of tone. The juxtaposition of ashen gray and faded green foliage, grayish brown soil, and a blue cloud-filled sky predominates.

The emotional tension in many of Ruisdael’s later works eventually took the form of subjective gloom (for example, Mountains in Norway, Hermitage).

REFERENCES

Fekhner, E. Iu. lakob van Reisdal i ego kartiny v Gosudarstvennom Ermitazhe. Leningrad, 1958.
Rosenberg, J. Jacob van Ruisdael. Boston [1928].
Wiegand, W. Ruisdael-Studien. Hamburg, 1968. (Dissertation.)