Nor was it only under aspects of stirring movement that Ruisdael found bigness. He could find it in calm: witness The Swamp in the Wood, in St. Petersburg, and the Oak Wood of the Berlin Gallery. In front, pale amber-green lily-pads, floating on depths of olive-green water, in the mingled light and shade of rich, somber golden-green and ruddy foliage; distant water and dunes, and over all a sky in which balloons of clouds hang drowsily. It recalls another masterpiece, this time of the Imperial Art-History Museum, Vienna, The Big Wood. Again a clump of oaks and a shattered silver birch, massed high and wide against a sky of wonderful luminosity. Everything is simplicity itself, yet expresses magisterial authority. The amplitude of conception on this occasion has no trace of stress or poignancy, nor is it one of calm; it is buoyant with a glorious joyousness.
Another remarkable example, heightened into grandeur by impulse of the imagination, is the Landscape with Fence, in the Vienna Academy: a bit of sloping ground with some wooden sheep-cotes and a willow. But the light from a dull-gray slaty sky pales upon the willow and gleams with a strange whiteness on the boards of the fence. The picture, moreover, is painted with unerring mastery of form and splendid fluency, which, combined with its startling arrangement of light, produces an effect of extraordinary impressiveness.
By a method of lighting, somewhat similar, a mood of profound and bitter melancholy has been interpreted in The Jewish Cemetery of the Dresden Gallery. In the murk of the distance a ruin glooms gauntly under a heavy purplish slaty sky, where a faint rainbow shows amid the turbid clouds. In the foreground a blasted tree-trunk cuts white against a dull mass of trees; but the brightest light, pallid and cold, is concentrated upon one of a group of tombs. The stillness is broken by a stream that shatters itself on the stones and rushes on. Is this solemn picture an allegory of Ruisdael’s own darkened life and its approaching end? Possibly, for his signature, undated, appears upon a tombstone on the left.
The examples quoted above are fairly representative of an artist who handled the prose of nature with so large a sense of its significance that he lifts it up to poetry, of epic and occasionally tragic grandeur. For Ruisdael, like Rembrandt, saw into the soul of facts. That in a period of fifty years or thereabouts a school of artists could be formed, wherein there are so many excellent craftsmen, not a few masters of technique and expression, and two great masters of the soul, is a marvelous record. Such was Holland’s legacy of the seventeenth century to the civilization of the modern world.
THE JEWISH CEMETERY JACOB VAN RUISDAEL
DRESDEN GALLERY