THERE is a tendency to identify Jacob van Ruisdael too exclusively with his pictures of mountainous scenery and rocky waterfalls; hence to speak of him as a romantic painter. But the true Ruisdael must be sought elsewhere. These romantic subjects belong to his latest period, in the seventies, when the indifference shown by the public to his own manner had induced him to imitate that of Everdingen’s Swedish landscape, and of the pictures of Swiss scenery by Roghman and Hackaert. How superior he was to Everdingen, we have already noticed[F] in comparing the examples of these two men that hang close together in the Munich Pinakothek. Ruisdael’s knowledge of and feeling for form, his power of construction not only of the details but also of the ensemble, his mastery of sky and cloud effects, and, above all, his individual and powerful personality combine to produce in these scenes of wild solitude with their plunging cataracts a suggestion as of great organ music, beside which Everdingen’s pictures have only the tinkle of picturesqueness. Yet while Ruisdael, as was to be expected, was superior to Everdingen, he is in these pictures inferior to himself. That his health was failing may possibly account for it; that he painted on dark grounds and the black has in many cases come through and dulled the resonance of the colors, overdarkening the shadows, is another reason; but the chief one is to be found in his changed attitude. He was no longer drawing his inspiration direct from nature itself.
The finer examples of his latest style, such as the Landscape with Waterfall of the National Gallery, still exhibit his power in rendering the movement and the mass of water, while others are impregnated with that solitary grandeur which was a characteristic quality of his genius. But it is in these instances touched with moroseness, with something possibly of the sentimental sorrows of a Werther. The great artist, whose lonely bachelor life had been spent in meditating upon the bigness of nature, was now brooding over the littleness of the world’s appreciation of himself; introspection had taken the place of that large looking out upon the world which hitherto had been the habit of his life. These romantic subjects, in fact, represent the waning of his powers; for the complete revelation of his genius we must look elsewhere, beyond the invented landscapes, to those in which nature itself has inspired the mood which dominates its interpretation.
Meanwhile let us glance at the brief facts of the artist’s life. He was born in Haarlem, in 1628 or 1629, the son of a picture-frame maker, and nephew of Salomon van Ruisdael, who was probably his teacher. At about the age of twenty he was enrolled in the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke. Some years later he settled in Amsterdam and was admitted to the rights of citizenship.
OAK-WOOD JACOB VAN RUISDAEL
THE BERLIN GALLERY
Among his pupils at this period was Meindert Hobbema. At the age of fifty-three he returned to his native city, broken in health and without means of subsistence, and through the intervention of some friends of the Mennonite faith was given refuge in the poorhouse. Here he lingered a few months and died in 1682, one more example among so many in the story of Dutch painting of an artist dying in poverty. This is the ugly side of the story. In telling it we have tried to do justice to the part played by the young republic, out of whose hard-won nationality a great school of artists grew; but at the same time we have not overlooked the quick decadence of national and social spirit that followed upon the attainment of political liberty. And of this sapping of the morality of the people the indifference paid to her great artists was not the least notable symptom.
Ruisdael’s youth and the prime of his manhood were spent in studying the wooded dunes, open country, seashore, and large stretches of water in the neighborhood of Haarlem and Amsterdam. These supplied the subjects for his finest and most characteristic pictures, while others suggest that he traveled in different parts of Holland and even penetrated into the neighboring German principality of Münster, a hilly country with forests and old castles: witness Castle Bentheim of the Dresden Gallery. The dated pictures are comparatively rare and belong chiefly to Ruisdael’s earliest period, but it is possible to assign approximate dates to many later ones through examination of the figures which were introduced by other artists. As Bode points out, those to which Adriaen van Ostade, Nicolaes Berchem, and Wouwerman contributed may with much probability be assigned to the Haarlem period, which terminated about 1655; on the other hand, when, among the Amsterdam artists, Adriaen van de Velde was his collaborator, the picture must antedate that artist’s death in 1672.