The Story of Dutch Painting

by Charles H. Caffin

Like all the greatest artists of landscape, Ruisdael was a close student of form, his drawings and etchings being often so conscientious in treatment as to suggest that he was something of a botanist. At any rate, few men have shown a more thorough knowledge of trees, their character of bulk and build, their branch-growths and manner of leafage, while the same constructive sense appears in his delineation of ground, rocks, water, and in that final test of great landscape-painting, the comprehension and rendering of skies. In his earlier work this preoccupation with form results in an excess of detail and a considerable tightness and hardness of method, as may be observed in the little Village in the Wood of the Dresden Gallery.

Later his works acquire breadth; details are treated more freely and are less obtrusive; the feeling for ensemble is more complete. And corresponding with this ampler motive is a clearer eye for the local colors, a richer and fuller tonality. Then, by degrees, the true Ruisdael discovers himself. As we know him in the finest works of the Amsterdam period, his genius is declared in the amplitude of his conception of nature. We are in the presence of one who has comprehended the vastness of its suggestion, and entered into it, merging therein the pettiness of personality. At these great moments it would be hard to mention a landscape-painter whose outlook is larger, freer, and more impersonal than Ruisdael’s, whose attitude is more truly epic; usually with an ample expression of serene benignity, but, even when there is stir of conflict, with an all-embracing vision that merges the accidental in the universal.

In the attainment of this magnificent composure it is the skies that play the greatest part. They occupy a large, often the larger, portion of the canvas. They are not only expanses of light, contrasted with the darker tones of the ground, as in the case of most Holland landscapes, but are pervaded with vibrating atmosphere that, while it penetrates to the front, seems to communicate with endless space. To this element of universal suggestion is added the stimulus of the poised or drifting cloud-forms. They are not merely shapes of vapor, but have bulk and weight and carrying power. They are to the fluid mass of the sky what the wave is to the ocean: a manifestation of its boundless energies. While to him the ground and its forms of tree and rock or dune are symbols of stability and static force, the sky is symbol of dynamic energy unbounded. It is because Ruisdael thus felt and could interpret the symbolism of nature that his finest landscapes and marines create and maintain so profound an impression.

Among the pictures prior to 1655 is View of Haarlem from the Hill of Overveen, a subject by which Ruisdael seems to have trained and disciplined himself, for he often repeated it. There are said to be twenty examples, some of which are in the galleries of The Hague and Berlin, in the Rijks Museum, and used to be included in the Holford and Kann collections. From the elevation in the foreground one looks down and across a stretch of level country, broken up with trees and houses and a field where strips of linen are bleaching, to the city, over which rises the mass of the Groote Kerk, St. Bavon. But two thirds of the canvas is given to the sky. The picture presents an elaborate study in the art of ground-and sky-construction, in the difficult differentiation of the planes of a level country, and in building the sky’s volume and depth. Already there are distance and spaciousness, but as yet little expression, while, in the case of the Berlin example especially, the technique is still a trifle hard and dry.

But, without attempting any chronological order, turn to The Beach at the Hague Gallery, a replica of which, Shore at Scheveningen, is in the National Gallery, while there are others elsewhere. A cliff projects on the right; otherwise the water, dotted with wading figures and sail-boats, extends clear back from the front to a low horizon, above which is a sky piled and scattered with loose, buoyant clouds. There is wind in them, and it ruffles the long reaches of waves that glide in over the sand. Here is freedom not only of brushwork but of imagination, which has been stirred by the sense of vastness and of movement. The sea itself spreads far and is alive with briskness, but in the endless distance of the sky the clouds are moving grandly. This picture already gives the clue to Ruisdael’s fully developed genius. It prefigures his capacity to comprehend the big in nature; to go out to it and mingle with it; to find it, not in stupendous spectacles, but in the sense of vastness that even familiar scenes may convey to one who realizes and

THE MILL NEAR WYK-BY-DUURSTEDE JACOB VAN RUISDAEL

RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM

feels the bigness in nature everywhere about us. For compare The Mill near Wyk-by-Duurstede, Ruisdael’s masterpiece in the Rijks Museum. Familiar enough in Holland are the ingredients of this scene: gray water, gray lowering sky, olive-green, brown, and pale-buff ground and trees, a gleam of light on the body of the mill; yet with what a majesty of conception they are clothed! Everything is heightened and made poignantly compelling by a beautiful, tremendous dignity.