Ruisdael, Jacob van (redirected from Ruysdael)

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.