Jacob van Ruisdael
Master of the Dutch landscape.
Jacob van Ruisdael painted windmills, waterfalls and vast cloudy skies. His landscapes have a gravity that points forward to Romanticism.
Jacob van Ruisdael was born in Haarlem around 1628–29. His father was a frame maker and painter, and his uncle Salomon van Ruysdael was a well-known landscape painter. Jacob probably learned his trade within the family. He became a member of the painters' guild in Haarlem in 1648, when he was already an accomplished painter.
Around 1650 he travelled to the area along the German-Dutch border and painted Bentheim Castle on its hill several times. Around 1656 he moved to Amsterdam, where he lived for the rest of his life. He also painted waterfalls and coniferous forests, inspired by another Dutch painter who had travelled in Scandinavia. Ruisdael himself probably never visited the north. He had several pupils, among them Meindert Hobbema.
Ruisdael painted the Dutch landscape with a low horizon and vast cloudy skies. In The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede from around 1670 in the Rijksmuseum a mill stands dark and monumental against a bright sky. His views of Haarlem show the town far off on the plain, with bleaching fields in the foreground and the sky taking up most of the picture. In The Jewish Cemetery, which exists in two versions in Dresden and Detroit, ruins, dead trees and graves carry a grave, symbolic meaning about the transience of life.
Ruisdael never married. A claim that he was also a physician appears in older sources but is uncertain. He died in Amsterdam in 1682 and was buried in Haarlem.
Ruisdael is regarded as the foremost of the Dutch landscape painters. His dramatic and atmospheric nature was admired by the Romantic generation. Goethe wrote an essay about him as a poet, and the English painter John Constable copied his works and saw him as a forerunner.