Jacob van Ruisdael Giclée Fine Art Prints

Jacob Isaackszoon van Ruisdael (c. 1628-1682) was a Dutch painter, draftsman and etcher, the leading landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, known for dense woods, rushing waterfalls, windmills and broad views of Haarlem beneath towering skies. He always spelled his name with an "i". That small habit matters to historians, because his father Isaack, his uncle Salomon van Ruysdael and his cousin Jacob Salomonszoon van Ruysdael all painted landscapes too, and their similar names and signatures still make it hard to say who painted what.

He was born in Haarlem in 1628 or 1629. The family name came from a vanished castle in Blaricum, the village of his grandfather, the furniture maker Jacob de Goyer. After de Goyer moved to Naarden, three of his sons took the name Ruysdael or Ruisdael, probably to mark where they came from. Even Ruisdael's mother is uncertain: she was either Isaack's first wife, whose name is lost, or Maycken Cornelisdochter, whom Isaack married in November 1628. Nor is it known who trained the boy. Lessons from his father or uncle are often assumed but undocumented. The clearer debt is to two other Haarlem landscapists, Cornelis Vroom and Allart van Everdingen. The family belonged to the Mennonite community, while Jacob himself was baptized into the Reformed Church as an adult, on 17 June 1657 at Ankeveen near Naarden.

His earliest dated paintings and etchings are from 1646, and two years later he joined the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke. A large dune landscape of 1646, now in the Hermitage, already sets tree-covered dunes in the center and lets a break in the clouds light up a sandy track, instead of following the familiar wide view of dunes and distant houses. The art historian Hofstede de Groot found it barely believable that a seventeen-year-old had painted it. Ruisdael laid on his paint more heavily than earlier landscapists, so that his foliage seems full of sap, and he observed trees so closely that modern botanists can identify them by genus. In 1647 he painted his first panorama, View of Naarden, a low town under an immense sky. All thirteen of his known etchings belong to these early years. Few impressions were ever pulled, and five survive in a single sheet each, which suggests he treated them as experiments.

For a landscape painter he traveled surprisingly little: to Blaricum, Egmond aan Zee and Rhenen in the 1640s, and in 1650, together with his friend Nicolaes Berchem, just over the German border to Bentheim and Steinfurt. The trip changed his work. Forms grew larger and weightier. He painted Bentheim Castle about a dozen times, steadily raising its modest hill until, in a version of 1653, it crowns a wooded mountain. In Germany he also saw water mills and became the first painter to make them the main subject of a picture, as in Two Watermills and an Open Sluice of 1653. After that year he almost entirely stopped dating his canvases, for reasons no one knows.

Around 1656 or 1657 he followed van Everdingen to Amsterdam, a richer market, and became a citizen there in 1659. Meindert Hobbema, documented as his pupil in 1660, was his only recorded student. The two may have traveled toward the German border together in 1661, and in 1668 Ruisdael witnessed Hobbema's wedding. Landscape painters usually worked for the open market, and only one commission is known: around 1660 he painted the landscape for a picture of the Amsterdam burgomaster Cornelis de Graeff and his family arriving at Soestdijk, with Thomas de Keyser adding the figures and the coach. Figures in his later pictures are mostly by other hands, among them Berchem, Adriaen van de Velde, Philips Wouwerman and Johannes Lingelbach.

The Amsterdam years brought his widest range. He produced more than 150 Scandinavian scenes with firs, boulders and waterfalls, although he never went to Scandinavia; van Everdingen had been there in 1644 and made the subject popular, and Ruisdael soon surpassed him. The ruins of Egmond Castle appear in both versions of The Jewish Cemetery, where crumbling tombs and overgrown walls give way to vegetation, the one painting generally accepted as an allegory of the transience of life. Influenced by Simon de Vlieger and Jan Porcellis, he turned to the sea, and Rough Sea at a Jetty is built from little more than black, white, blue and a few earth browns. In The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede of about 1670, flat land, river and sky converge on a single round mill. He also painted the Haerlempjes, panoramas of Haarlem and its linen-bleaching fields under bands of light and shadow, usually dominated by the church of St. Bavo. Mountain scenes came late, and View on the Amstel Looking Towards Amsterdam is among his last paintings.

Ruisdael never married. His early biographer Arnold Houbraken claimed he stayed single to look after his aged father, and also that he studied medicine and practiced surgery in Amsterdam. A crossed-out entry for a "Jacobus Ruijsdael" with a 1676 degree from Caen does appear on a list of Amsterdam doctors, but the spelling and his enormous output make most scholars doubt it was him. No portrait of him exists. The old story that he died destitute in a Haarlem almshouse turned out to concern his cousin. In fact his pictures sold well: in inventories of 1650-1679 a Ruisdael averaged 40 guilders against 19 for an attributed painting in general, and he appears to have lived comfortably even after the crisis of 1672. He died in Amsterdam on 10 March 1682 and was buried on 14 March in St. Bavo's in Haarlem, under the tower that rises over so many of his views.

After his death, Houbraken praised his falling water and seas in 1718, and his influence spread to the English Romantics, the Barbizon painters and the Hudson River School. Gainsborough copied one of his paintings in the 1740s, Turner invented a "Port Ruysdael", and Constable wrote that a Ruisdael haunted his mind, though he judged The Jewish Cemetery a failure for reaching beyond what painting can do. Goethe called him a thinking artist, almost a poet; Ruskin attacked him in 1860. Vincent van Gogh kept prints of The Bush and a Haerlempje on his wall and admired The Bush and The Ray of Light in the Louvre. Seymour Slive's catalogue of 2001 accepts 694 paintings. The largest groups are in the National Gallery in London, with twenty, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, with sixteen, and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The first exhibition devoted to him alone opened at the Mauritshuis in The Hague in 1981.