From this period dates the lamentable change in Ruisdael’s art. The master, whose native independence is so marked that one is at a loss to name his probable teacher, of his own will and in sheer mortification of spirit at his want of success, forces himself from the meadows and dunes of his delight, and invents, to win the patronage of the rich men of Amsterdam, a Norway of his own. A visit to North Germany, of which there is some evidence, helped his invention. Now begins the long series of waterfalls and pines and torrents so familiar in the picture galleries. It is not on these that Ruisdael’s fame rests; on this ground Everdingen, in spite of his inferior merits as a painter, remains his master. But as the pictures of this period are the most common, the public is apt to identify him with this acquired style in which the true Ruisdael is obscured. For this reason it was a fortunate choice which secured for the National Gallery, two years ago, so exquisite a specimen of the painter at his best as the Shore at Scheveningen, No. 1390. The chilly ending of an afternoon, with clouds blowing up and the rain beginning, the vexed movement of shallow water as the rising wind breaks it into short waves, the wetness of the spray-laden atmosphere, are painted with a sensitive subtlety that more modern landscape, with all its triumphs, has not excelled. The mood of feeling here expressed is intimately Ruisdael’s own. Without the brooding melancholy which became oppressively habitual later, which found such grandiose expression in pictures like the famous Jews’ Burying-place at Dresden, there is here a latent sadness that seems to have been bred in the fibre of the man. It seems a kind of expectation of sorrow; the mood that poetry with greater intensity has expressed in some lines of Browning which suggest themselves:

The rain set early in to-night;
The sullen wind was soon awake:
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake.
I listened, with heart fit to break....

For such a nature who would predict happiness? Fortune satisfied that inborn melancholy to the full. The years brought increasing poverty, and the cares of providing for himself and for his father wore the artist down. The autumn of 1681 found him ill and helpless; so helpless that the religious community to which he belonged, the sect of Mennonites, procured admission for him to their almshouse at Haarlem. There he lingered till the next spring. In March he was buried in St. Bavon’s.

VI

Ruisdael’s etchings are but twelve, or perhaps thirteen, in number; only seven being catalogued by Bartsch. Their fewness shows, what their technical qualities confirm, that the artist neither had great aptitude for this method of expression nor cared to pursue his experiments in it far. They all belong to his earliest period. One, the Three Oaks (B. 6), is dated 1649, and it is difficult to assign any of the others, except possibly the Cornfield, to a later date.

Of the four large plates, the one which Bartsch calls Les Voyageurs (B. 4), is decidedly the most interesting. It is a forest scene, wild and intricate, with water running or standing in pools among the great roots of the oak which occupies the centre and of the beech which fills the left. The two figures are passing in the middle distance, where the wood is clearer. It is a remnant, perhaps, of that vast forest which at one time covered the whole of Holland. Ruisdael’s strong feeling for old trees, for the solitude of forests, densely branching and mysterious, inspires him here; and one has only to turn to the facile etchers of sylvan scenery, Waterloo or Swanevelt, or Van der Cabel, to realise the difference between the man who feels what he cannot perfectly master and the man who has perfect mastery of a facile formula. Ruisdael never succeeded in finding a quite satisfactory convention for foliage in etched line; but his continual feeling after truth of rendering, his sensitiveness, to which the forms of branch and leaf are always fresh and wonderful, make his work always interesting.

The three other large plates (B. 1-3) are less successful handlings of the same kind of subject. Though the first, The Little Bridge, is not a forest scene, and represents a decayed old farm-building, it is penetrated with the same feeling for picturesque, moss-grown antiquity and neglected solitude. The Three Oaks are etched with truth and strength, but they do not rival the grandeur of the oak in the larger plate. The Cornfield (Fig. 17) is sunny and pleasant.

There are two states of the four large plates, and many of the Three Oaks and the Cornfield. As the later states are by far the more common, it is well to be warned that the plates have been retouched, and, in the writer’s opinion, certainly not by Ruisdael. In the first three a pudding-shaped cloud, with hard, bulging edges (what a satire on this consummate master of clouds!) has been inserted, and in all there is fresh work, sometimes adding to the effect of the plate, but still suggesting an alien hand.

Ruisdael’s etching is little more than an illustration of his painting; criticism, therefore, of the one must deal to a certain extent with the other.

Ruisdael’s great fame rests, perhaps, as much on his historical importance as on his actual merit. With Hobbema he prepared the way for Crome and Constable, and through them for Rousseau and the landscape of modern France. But, taken on his own merits, he is a considerable figure. Were it not for the fatiguing series of unpersuasive waterfalls, which too often represent him, his real qualities would have more chance of making themselves felt. When on his own ground he is