A pollarded willow overhanging a river

Dating to the early 1650s, this picture recently re-emerged from a Dutch private collection as a significant work from Jacob van Ruisdael’s early maturity. Arguably the greatest landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, the artist was unrivalled in his meticulous rendering of realistic detail while imbuing his subjects with a grandeur and dynamism that belies their comparatively small scale.

The landscape, showing a cottage and trees bordering a calm river, exemplifies the qualities of a group of paintings from the 1650s that Seymour Slive has described as ‘plain Dutch Scenes…that appear to be hardly modified excerpts from nature’ (S. Slive, ed., Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape, exhibition catalogue, London, 2006, p. 94). Throughout this group, the painter often used a relatively bright palette and expanded his compositions to convey a sense of light and space. The scrupulous care with which Ruisdael rendered the thatched roof and brickwork, partially covered by plaster, of the cottage at the left can likewise be observed in other works of the early 1650s, including the Two Water Mills and an Open Sluice of 1653 in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Landscape with a Half-timbered Cottage near a Stream in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne. This type of cottage was, according to Slive, not common in the western part of the Netherlands. Ruisdael probably observed such buildings during his trip to the border of the Dutch Republic and Westphalia around 1650. Similarly, the delicate foliage of the trees and the rushes in the water, both of which the artist has brightly illuminated through rapid strokes of pale green paint, are typical features of this early period in the artist’s career.

Almost half of Ruisdael’s composition is given over to sky, gloriously depicting the interplay between light and clouds. The painter’s remarkable skill at rendering clouds and light effects recurs throughout his oeuvre and was greatly admired by subsequent generations of painters. John Constable, who made a number of copies after Ruisdael, described the ‘large rolling clouds’ of the painter’s work, and enthused about the way they ‘enveloped the most ordinary scenes in grandeur’ (J. Thornes, John Constable’s Skies: A Fusion of Art and Science, Birmingham, 1999, p. 172).

We are grateful to Frits Duparc for endorsing the attribution to Ruisdael following firsthand inspection of the painting.