A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools / Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin

by Unknown

854. A FOREST SCENE.

Ruysdael (Dutch: 1628-1682). See 627.

Of this picture, when it was in Sir Robert Peel's collection, Mrs. Jameson tells a pretty tale. "'I cannot express to you,' said the statesman, 'the feeling of tranquillity, of restoration, with which, in an interval of harassing official business, I look around me here.' And while he spoke, in the slow, quiet tone of a weary man, he turned his eyes on a forest scene of Ruysdael, and gazed on it for a minute or two in silence, as if its cool, dewy verdure, its deep seclusion, its transparent waters stealing through the glade, had sent refreshment into his very soul" (Handbook to the Private Galleries of London, p. xix.).