THE YOUNG BULLPAUL POTTERHAGUE MUSEUM
THE YOUNG BULLPAUL POTTERHAGUE MUSEUM
THE YOUNG BULLPAUL POTTER
HAGUE MUSEUM
The son of an obscure painter, Potter was born at Enkhuizen in 1625. From 1646 to 1648 he resided at Delft, where his masterpiece,The Young Bullof the Hague Gallery, was painted. In 1649 he moved to The Hague and married the daughter of an architect, Adriana Balckeneijnde. In 1652 he moved to Amsterdam and continued to reside there until his death in 1654.
The Young Bullis an amazing achievement of self-discipline and almost passionate pursuit of truth. It suggests the attitude of the painter to have been that once and for all he would master the creature’s appearance. He set himself a great task of prolonged endurance and has carried it through to an extraordinary realization. The character of the beast, as it shows itself to the eye; the incidents of its form and carriage; the glossy pelt with its actual surface of hair, the brilliant eye, the damp nozzle—every detail is of life. Having completed this study, which established for himself the knowledge and skill he had sought and became a model for the instruction of other artists, he filled in the rest of the canvas in a somewhat perfunctory manner. The sky has good quality, but remains a background in the rear of the composition; the intermediate landscape, overspread effectively with a pale light, does not maintain its proper plane. The beasts in the foreground are as hard as wood, the details of the tree niggling, and the figure of the man ill drawn and tamely comprehended. In fact, it is not as a picture that the canvas is remarkable, but for its consummately realistic treatment of the one overpowering detail.
Other large canvases, also products of the artist’s extreme youth, are theBear Huntof the Rijks Museum and theBoar Huntin the Carstanjen Collection of the Berlin Gallery. They are open to the same general criticism, without the wonderful exception. They are evidences of a young man’s exuberant indiscretion, though he was probably induced to it by the high value that clients set upon such pictures. Meanwhile, as early as 1646, that is to say, when he was twenty-one, he was settling down to the smaller pictures, artistically felt and rendered, that mark the end of his career. One of the earliest of these, dated 1648, is the scene ofCattle and Bathers, in the Hague Gallery; finely composed and full of happy observation of country life, but somewhat hard in texture. Yet the previous year had produced theHorses at the Door of a Cottageof the Louvre, where the scene is enveloped in the soft half-light of a glowing evening sky. Another beautiful evening scene isLandscape with Cattleof the National Gallery.
Thischarmingly original and versatile artist, whose works abound in public and private collections, was born in Haarlem in 1619 and died there in 1668. He studied landscape with Jan Wynants, but the teacher who set the tenor of his career was Frans Hals. It was from the latter that he derived his skill in handling figures, composing them in groups, placing them in space, and rendering them with fluency and vitality of brushwork; and the principles thus acquired were applied by him also to the treatment of the landscape. On his own part he brought to his work a singularly alert observation, that was happy in hitting upon the fugitive and accidental aspects of a scene, and a fancy that invests his subject with a lyrical grace.
His fecundity was such that it is estimated he left some seven hundred examples, which may be divided into those of his early period, which extended through the forties, and those of his maturity, which belong to the fifties and early sixties. He was brought up during the vicissitudes of the Thirty Years’ War, and the impressions of soldiering suggested many of his subjects of cavalry, skirmishing, on the march, or halting at an inn. Elsewhere it is hunting parties, riding parties, gay cavalcades of ladies and gentlemen; then, again, scenes of farming life: the bringing home of hay, watering of horses, scenes in the smithy—an inexhaustible array of incidents in which figure men and women and their friends, the horse and dog. With such unusual productivity it is not strange that some of his pictures suffered by haste of execution. This is especially true of his latest pictures, where the shadows have come through and destroyed the brilliance of the colors. For, though Wouwerman was not a colorist, he was an adept at suggesting the gaiety of color, and his best pictures are bouquets of animated brilliance.
Sonof a prosperous portrait-painter of Dordrecht, Aelbert Cuyp enjoyed ample means, married a widow, rich and well connected, was highly esteemed and held public offices in his own community, and throughout the eighteenth century continued to be prized by collectors as the “Dutch Claude.” The result was that he could paint to please himself. It is true that occasionally he was persuaded to paint portraits of his wife’s aristocratic connections, some on horseback, but these less characteristic pictures are exceptions. Living far from the centers of artists, he was devoted to country life, making visits occasionally along the Maas to Nimwegen or up the Rhine as far as Bergen, but for the most part indulging his love of nature in the neighborhood around his native city. The happiness of the man and the artist’s joy in the life of simple things—his ample means made possible the simple life—are reflected in the sunniness of his landscapes, and in the big, lazy, comfortable kine that graze and bask and chew the cud beside slowly moving waters in the neighborhood of pleasant homesteads, steeped in the warmth of sunshine. “Only in his own home on the lower Maas,” writes the modern artist, Jan Veth, himself a native of Dordrecht, “only near Dordrecht, could he find this happy country, where a delicate vapor from the rich marshy lands lies over the meadows, which in the morning and evening hours are covered with a peculiar golden veil.”
His best pictures are in private collections in England and Paris and in the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection, and the galleries of St. Petersburg and Budapest. They number nearly fifty that can be regarded as masterpieces. On the other hand, the pictures by which he is represented in many galleries will disappoint the student who has formed a high expectation of this artist’s merit. For he was as unequal in his manner as he was varied in his choice of subjects, which, besides landscape and portraiture, included also genre, still-life, church interiors, and historical paintings.
He was born in Dordrecht in 1620 and died there in 1691. Besides the instruction that he received from his father, he is supposed to have been influenced by Van Goyen, for his early work shows a recollection of the latter’s grayish tones.
Inthe Rijks Museum is a portrait by Adriaen van de Velde that represents himself and his family. In a country spot they have alighted from their carriage, and while a groom attends to the handsome horses, the artist and his young wife, a little child, and a nurse with the baby in her arms are grouped in the road. The artist is of refined and gracious mien, while the spirit of the whole scene breathes prosperity and happiness. The portrait is indicative of his art, of the gracious freshness, joyousness, and sweet tranquillity that characterize his landscapes. For, though he painted some Biblical and historical subjects, his true métier was landscape, with the ingratiating addition of groups of figures and animals. So highly appreciated was his gift of treatingthese groups that many of the landscape artists of Amsterdam employed him to introduce them into their pictures. Hobbema was among the number, as may be seen in that artist’s picture,The Water Mill, owned by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, where the cow and the figures of the man and woman are by Van de Velde.
Born in Amsterdam in 1636, Adriaen belonged to the Van de Velde family of artists, his earliest teacher being his father, the naval painter, Willem the Elder. Then he studied with Jan Wynants at Haarlem and later with Philips Wouwerman. He was also influenced by Potter and Nicolaes Berchem, perhaps gaining from the latter his occasional fondness for the Italianized kind of landscape. But this is mere supposition.
Even Berchem (1620-1683) is only supposed to have visited Italy, because of the character of the subjects he represented. All that is definitely known about him is that he resided in Haarlem and Amsterdam. His treatment, however, of the Italianized landscape, with its goats and cows and peasants, is inferior to the art of Van de Velde. It charms at first by its sunny picturesqueness; but it is discovered by degrees to be a product of routine and mannerism. A studied affectation becomes apparent in the arrangement of the groups, and a monotonous reiteration of the effects of light: some object always placed near the center to catch the chief illumination, while a corresponding formality is repeated again and again in the distribution of the light and shade.
But such mechanics of picture-making never occur in Van de Velde’s landscapes. There is always a freshnessof vision, characterized, moreover, by delicate observation, that puts him on a par with Wouwerman, though the sentiment of his pictures is his own.
Ithas already been remarked that the naval and marine pictures are an exception to the general rule that Dutch painting reflects nothing of the war and the turbulence of the times. The headquarters of the craft was naturally the great shipping and commercial center, Amsterdam. Here in the early part of the seventeenth century lived Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom. Born in Haarlem in 1566, he had, previously to his settling down in the Dutch capital, visited France, England, and Italy, while there is good reason to believe that shipwreck had increased his experiences by enforced sojourn on the west coast of Africa. He makes a brave showing in the Rijks Museum with records of Dutch vessels running down Spanish galleys and a sea-fight on the Haarlem Meer, and always his signature appears proudly on a pennon at the masthead of a winning ship.
Simon de Vlieger, a native of Rotterdam, where he was born in 1693, is another painter of stirring sea-fights, though he also represents the peaceful side of shipping; witnessA River Scene, in the Rijks Museum, where a big-sailed merchantman from the Indies lies near some little boats on the wind-flecked water, a picture full of bracing suggestion.
Lieve Verschuier (1630-1686), also a native of Rotterdam, could present with vigorous effect the busy aspect of the harbor, as may be seen at the Rijks Museum in hisCharles II Entering Rotterdam, 24 May, 1660.
But the greatest of this stalwart group were Willem van de Velde the Elder, and his son, Willem the Younger. Both were born in Leyden, the former in 1611, the younger in 1633, and, after a period in Amsterdam, settled in England, where the father died in London, 1693, and the son at Greenwich, in 1707. The characteristic of these men is their treatment of the shipping; for with them, as with the others, the shipping and the sky are of more concern than the water. They give the great galleons and bulky Indiamen the personality almost of sentient things: creatures of power and importance, swelling with the pride of consequence.
THE greatest name in Holland landscape, second only to Rembrandt, as many believe, in Dutch art, is Jacob van Ruisdael. Of the comparative merits of the other two leaders of Dutch landscape, opinions may differ; but personally I give the palm to Van Goyen.
Jan Josephsz van Goyen, to give his full name, was born in Leyden, in 1576. He was the pupil of several teachers, including Esaias van de Velde. At about the age of twenty-one he made a journey to France in the company of one of his teachers. Later he visited Belgium and the northern part of France, the sketches of this trip being still preserved in the Print Collection of Dresden. Moreover, from the subjects of his pictures, it is evident that he traveled extensively in Holland. Toward 1634 he settled at The Hague, continuing to work there until his death in 1656. His pictures found ready sale, but he speculated unfortunately in houses and pictures and was a victim of that Dutch “South Sea Bubble,” the speculative mania in tulips. Consequently he died poor.
His work embraces three manners. The first, which lasted until about 1630, shows a tendency to brown, with highly colored figures in which notes of red predominate. This is the period of Esaias van de Velde’s influence. Inthe second period he begins to be himself; the color becomes more subdued, the skies more clear, and the tonality mingles grayness with the browns or becomes greenish. This lasts for some years, and then gradually a finer sense of picturesqueness regulates the compositions; the technique gains in breadth and authority; the tonality is attained almost without color.
An example of the early method isView of Dordrecht, in the Hague Gallery. The town is seen in the distance across an expanse of water, furred by the wind; in the left foreground, the harbor bank with figures and horses; a sail-boat scudding toward the right. It is a gray day, translated into tones of brown; an exquisitely impressionistic vision of the occasion and scene.
A very remarkable picture of the transition stage between the first and second periods is theLandscape(No. 990) of the Rijks Museum, illustrated in this book. In the coat of the man on the left the vivid spot of red appears; his companion’s coat is blue; and these two notes of color vibrate sharply against the drabbish lowering sky. The ground is buffish green and the oaks brown. It is a picture of extraordinary dramatic effect.
Two fine examples of the artist’s middle and later period are in the Berlin Gallery:View of Arnheim(1646) andView of Nimwegen(1649). The former shows a horseman in the foreground and a cart farther back, where a gleam of light strikes, while the distant town is in shadow; and above this striking contrast is a magnificent height of sky filled with light and scattered with a few loose, well-constructed clouds. The tonality is composed of cream, gray, brown, and green. Thelater example already shows the prevalence of brown. The architecture is constructed in tones of pale brown and buff; the water in front is grayish white, and the ample sky admits a little rose amid the grayish blue. It is a picture of large feeling, and yet the details are still drawn in with that wriggling stroke of the brown brush which characterizes Van Goyen’s work, especially in the beginning and more or less to the end. It exhibits the feeling of one who is an engraver, as indeed he was; it is drawing rather than painting. The result is that some of his pictures seem more than a trifle niggling in their method. On the other hand, while he never gets away from it, he gets the better of it. He continues to model with these diminutive curlicues of vermicelli, now brown, now green, but the method disappears in the big impression aroused by the ensemble. Other notable examples of his later period areThe RiverandBanks of a Canal, in the Louvre.
But in the final analysis it is not the manner of an artist that is of most account, but the quality of his appeal. In the case of Van Goyen it isspirituel, not infrequently expressive of spirituality. Transmuted by his vision, the corporeality of the scene has been dissolved into a spiritual impression. It is, as it were, a mirage of nature that is offered to one’s imagination. Van Goyen lacks at once the height and depth of Jacob van Ruisdael; his moods are dreamy rather than poignant, and he appeals where the other compels. But his moods are those of a highly rarefied spirit, that seeks to interpret the bigness and the subtlety of what it feels by means as abstract as possible.
Hobbemais the very contrary to Van Goyen. A plain, practical, matter-of-fact man, he is content to paint what he sees, the objective appearances of the landscape, viewed through the unimaginative medium of a healthy naturalism. He was as little addicted to moods of feeling as to dreams; neither curious for new experiences nor moved to artistic ambition, for, having found a motive to his liking, he repeated it again and again with slight variations. Gifted with a strong sense of form and with an unusual faculty of representing it, he learned from Jacob van Ruisdael to cultivate both, but was too phlegmatic to receive inspiration from the master’s genius. Now and then he rose from his usual level to a height of objective grandeur; but for the most part was a prosy bourgeois, pottering round the parish.
He was born in 1638, his birthplace being variously assigned to Haarlem, Koevorden, and the village of Middelharnis, though it may have been Amsterdam, where he spent his life. At the age of thirty he married a maid-servant four years his senior. She had been in a well-to-do family, and through the influence of the latter a place was found for Hobbema in the Wines-customs. It was sufficient to keep him from actual want, but the fact did not spur him on to artistic effort. He painted, it would seem, only when he “felt like it,” which was not often, for the number of his pictures is for a Dutch artist inconsiderable. The earliest date on any of his pictures is 1650; the last that can be assigned with certainty is 1670, for though it is generally accepted that the date
THE AVENUE, MIDDELHARNIS, HOLLANDMEINDERT HOBBEMANATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON
THE AVENUE, MIDDELHARNIS, HOLLANDMEINDERT HOBBEMANATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON
THE AVENUE, MIDDELHARNIS, HOLLANDMEINDERT HOBBEMA
NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON
ofThe Avenue of Middelharnis, in the National Gallery, is 1689, the “8” is scarcely decipherable. If this date is accepted, it leaves the last twenty years of his life, for he died in 1709, unproductive. No reason for this is known, nor whether he retained his official position; the only fact ascertained being that, like his great master and so many other Dutch artists, he died in extreme poverty.
Neglected by his own countrymen, his best works found their way into English private collections, from which they are beginning to emerge into the hands of American collectors: witnessThe Water Mill, known as the “Trevor Landscape,” and theWooded Landscape, or “Holford Landscape,” now owned by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, and theWooded Road, in the possession of Mrs. William L. Elkins. Meanwhile Hobbema’s masterpiece isThe Avenue of Middelharnis, in the National Gallery, while the Louvre also owns a fine example inThe Water Mill, and the popularity and reputation which these works have so worthily obtained has led to an overestimation of this artist’s rank. He has even been classed with Van Ruisdael. On the evidence ofThe Avenuethis is intelligible, but unfortunately this picture is a unique example. The other pictures mentioned above are also examples to stir enthusiasm, but they, too, are exceptional. You will not find their equals anywhere in the galleries of Europe. On the contrary, those which you do find are dryly objective reiterations of oak-trees, water, mills, and houses, perfunctorily seen and rendered. They inspire little enthusiasm and weary by repetition.
The Avenue, on the contrary, is an extraordinary instance of a moment’s heightened vision of the facts, boldly grasped and carried through unerringly to a grand conclusion. Again, in the other pictures named, especially in Mr. Morgan’sThe Water Mill, there is evidence of something more than talent. A consummate knowledge of forms, skill of compositional construction, and ability to create an ensemble of tonality are here reinforced by a comprehension of the feeling of the scene, that has lifted it out of mere representation and enhanced its significance. But unfortunately the talent, transfigured in these examples, is, in the general run of this artist’s pictures, squandered; used without conscience and permitted to drift into heartless mannerism.
The fact is that, judged by the final test of the quality of the painter’s mental and artistic attitude toward his subject, the majority of Hobbema’s pictures rank considerably below par. It is such work as the generality of his, which makes the student of Dutch art sometimes pause in his wanderings through the galleries and ask himself whether there is not a great deal of perfunctoriness and tedious iteration among these old masters of Holland. There is, and the fact may as well be grasped first as last. It is a school of great craftsmen, who sometimes worked indifferently, punctuated with a considerable number who rise conspicuously above their fellows, but among these exceptions, save on rare occasions, Hobbema is not to be reckoned.
VIEW OF HAARLEMJACOB VAN RUISDAELFROM HILL OF OVERVEENRIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
VIEW OF HAARLEMJACOB VAN RUISDAELFROM HILL OF OVERVEENRIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
VIEW OF HAARLEMJACOB VAN RUISDAEL
FROM HILL OF OVERVEEN
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
THERE is a tendency to identify Jacob van Ruisdael too exclusively with his pictures of mountainous scenery and rocky waterfalls; hence to speak of him as a romantic painter. But the true Ruisdael must be sought elsewhere. These romantic subjects belong to his latest period, in the seventies, when the indifference shown by the public to his own manner had induced him to imitate that of Everdingen’s Swedish landscape, and of the pictures of Swiss scenery by Roghman and Hackaert. How superior he was to Everdingen, we have already noticed[F]in comparing the examples of these two men that hang close together in the Munich Pinakothek. Ruisdael’s knowledge of and feeling for form, his power of construction not only of the details but also of the ensemble, his mastery of sky and cloud effects, and, above all, his individual and powerful personality combine to produce in these scenes of wild solitude with their plunging cataracts a suggestion as of great organ music, beside which Everdingen’s pictures have only the tinkle of picturesqueness. Yet while Ruisdael, as was to be expected, was superior to Everdingen, he is in these pictures inferior to himself. That his health was failing may possibly account for it; thathe painted on dark grounds and the black has in many cases come through and dulled the resonance of the colors, overdarkening the shadows, is another reason; but the chief one is to be found in his changed attitude. He was no longer drawing his inspiration direct from nature itself.
The finer examples of his latest style, such as theLandscape with Waterfallof the National Gallery, still exhibit his power in rendering the movement and the mass of water, while others are impregnated with that solitary grandeur which was a characteristic quality of his genius. But it is in these instances touched with moroseness, with something possibly of the sentimental sorrows of a Werther. The great artist, whose lonely bachelor life had been spent in meditating upon the bigness of nature, was now brooding over the littleness of the world’s appreciation of himself; introspection had taken the place of that large looking out upon the world which hitherto had been the habit of his life. These romantic subjects, in fact, represent the waning of his powers; for the complete revelation of his genius we must look elsewhere, beyond the invented landscapes, to those in which nature itself has inspired the mood which dominates its interpretation.
Meanwhile let us glance at the brief facts of the artist’s life. He was born in Haarlem, in 1628 or 1629, the son of a picture-frame maker, and nephew of Salomon van Ruisdael, who was probably his teacher. At about the age of twenty he was enrolled in the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke. Some years later he settled in Amsterdam and was admitted to the rights of citizenship.
OAK-WOODJACOB VAN RUISDAELTHE BERLIN GALLERY
OAK-WOODJACOB VAN RUISDAELTHE BERLIN GALLERY
OAK-WOODJACOB VAN RUISDAEL
THE BERLIN GALLERY
Among his pupils at this period was Meindert Hobbema. At the age of fifty-three he returned to his native city, broken in health and without means of subsistence, and through the intervention of some friends of the Mennonite faith was given refuge in the poorhouse. Here he lingered a few months and died in 1682, one more example among so many in the story of Dutch painting of an artist dying in poverty. This is the ugly side of the story. In telling it we have tried to do justice to the part played by the young republic, out of whose hard-won nationality a great school of artists grew; but at the same time we have not overlooked the quick decadence of national and social spirit that followed upon the attainment of political liberty. And of this sapping of the morality of the people the indifference paid to her great artists was not the least notable symptom.
Ruisdael’s youth and the prime of his manhood were spent in studying the wooded dunes, open country, seashore, and large stretches of water in the neighborhood of Haarlem and Amsterdam. These supplied the subjects for his finest and most characteristic pictures, while others suggest that he traveled in different parts of Holland and even penetrated into the neighboring German principality of Münster, a hilly country with forests and old castles: witnessCastle Bentheimof the Dresden Gallery. The dated pictures are comparatively rare and belong chiefly to Ruisdael’s earliest period, but it is possible to assign approximate dates to many later ones through examination of the figures which were introduced by other artists. As Bode points out, those to which Adriaen van Ostade, Nicolaes Berchem, andWouwerman contributed may with much probability be assigned to the Haarlem period, which terminated about 1655; on the other hand, when, among the Amsterdam artists, Adriaen van de Velde was his collaborator, the picture must antedate that artist’s death in 1672.
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 littleVillage in the Woodof 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-painterwhose 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 isView 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 theelevation 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 toThe Beachat 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-DUURSTEDEJACOB VAN RUISDAELRIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
THE MILL NEAR WYK-BY-DUURSTEDEJACOB VAN RUISDAELRIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
THE MILL NEAR WYK-BY-DUURSTEDEJACOB VAN RUISDAEL
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
feels the bigness in nature everywhere about us. For compareThe 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.
Nor was it only under aspects of stirring movement that Ruisdael found bigness. He could find it in calm: witnessThe Swamp in the Wood, in St. Petersburg, and theOak Woodof 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 theLandscape 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 boardsof 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 inThe Jewish Cemeteryof 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 CEMETERYJACOB VAN RUISDAELDRESDEN GALLERY
THE JEWISH CEMETERYJACOB VAN RUISDAELDRESDEN GALLERY
THE JEWISH CEMETERYJACOB VAN RUISDAEL
DRESDEN GALLERY
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