European Painting and Sculpture

JACOB VAN RUISDAEL
(Dutch, 1628/29-1682)

Landscape with Cottages and a Blasted Tree, 1653
Oil on canvas
Museum purchase 1998.3

Jacob van Ruisdael was the most important Dutch landscape painter of the 17th century and one of the most influential landscape painters in western art. He brought a new emotional expressiveness to the depiction of landscape and introduced a grander, more monumental style to Dutch landscape painting.

Jacob van Ruisdael was born in the Dutch town of Haarlem in 1628/29. Although little is known about his life, he is believed to have studied painting with his father Isaack van Ruisdael (1599-1677) or his uncle Salomon van Ruysdael (1600/3-70), who spelled his name differently than his nephew. Jacob's earliest known paintings, which date from 1646, show scenes from the Dutch countryside.

In about 1650, he took a trip east to the Dutch-German border with his friend and fellow painter Nicolaes Berchem. There Ruisdael found a number of new subjects to paint, including water mills and half-timbered houses. Around 1656, Ruisdael moved to Amsterdam, the Netherlands's largest city, probably to take advantage of its thriving art market. He continued to live there until his death in 1682.

Ruisdael painted Landscape with Cottages and a Blasted Tree in 1653. It is an imaginary scene that incorporates some of the artist's favorite elements from the early 1650s: the dead willow tree, the stream with waterfall, and the half-timbered cottage. Ruisdael was a keen observer of nature and unequalled in the botanical accuracy of his depictions of trees and vegetation. The rushing stream and waterfall show the artist's celebrated ability to capture the motion of water. Perhaps his most expressive motifs are his trees, such as the magnificent dead willow encircled by a living vine. This image eloquently suggests that the underlying theme of the picture is the transitoriness of life played out in nature's endless cycle of birth, death, decay and renewal. Ruisdael unifies all these elements through his dramatic use of light and shadow as sunlight breaks though the clouds in a further display of the changeability of nature.