Wooded landscape

Aside from depictions of waterfalls, Ruisdael’s scenes of woods and forests form the largest group of his surviving paintings and are among his most iconic works. These subjects engaged him from his earliest activity as an artist, with his two earliest paintings, dated 1646, belonging to this group and would continue to do so throughout his career (for the early dated paintings, see Slive, op. cit., nos. 308 and 331). Ruisdael’s earliest production of wooded scenes tend to depict densely-packed woods with sandy paths that only infrequently permit a view of the middle ground through the thicket of tangled trees. By the late 1650s and 1660s, Ruisdael increasingly depicted clearings with open vistas in which large-scale trees no longer obfuscate the view but serve to anchor the foreground of the composition and open up the space behind.

According to Seymour Slive, the present painting is ‘a good example of the light and airy landscapes Ruisdael painted in the seventies,’ a period for which comparatively few forest views by the artist are known. Slive singled out for particular praise the ‘foliage of the slender, tall tree in the foreground,’ noting similarities between our painting and another example in a private collection in San Francisco (op. cit.; for the comparable painting, see Slive, op. cit., no. 419). That painting shares the fresh atmosphere, foreground clearing with diagonal recession into depth and opening in the central background but lacks the prominent small pond in the painting’s foreground.