Jacob van Ruisdael and Dutch landscape painting
Perhaps the most striking quality of Dutch landscape painting of the seventeenth century is its seeming realism, especially when compared to older landscapes. Flemish landscapes of the sixteenth century (Patenir) had been full of obvious artifice: a conventional brown foreground, green middle ground, and blue background, with fantastic rocks, peopled by hermits and saints, framed by trees on either side like a stage set. Italian landscape of the seventeenth century (Claude) is likewise very beautiful, but not at all like nature: landscapes bathed in golden light, with classical buildings, peopled by figures from mythology. Dutch painters of the seventeenth century usually did without all these artificial trappings and attempted to give an impression of the real world around them, although they themselves developed their own set of subtle artistic conventions. Painters in early seventeenth century Haarlem like Esaias van de Velde, Pieter de Molijn, Pieter van Santvoort, and Salamon van Ruysdael depicted ordinary, everyday subjects like sand dunes, winding roads, clumps of trees, tumbledown cottages, and boats on the river. A good example of the new naturalism is the "panoramic landscape", which depicts the flatness of the Dutch countryside and the vast expanse of sky. Two examples of this are Hendrick Goltzius' drawings of the dunes near Haarlem and the panoramic paintings of Philips Koninck, who worked in Amsterdam.
In addition to the subjects just mentioned, there were many others, including winter scenes, the seaside, ships at sea, and town squares. Dutch painters depicted a familiar topography, but they were selective in their choice of subjects and presented these chosen subjects in a somewhat idealised manner. Their main aim was to produce saleable pictures, pleasing images to hang on the wall. Thus many features of the actual Dutch landscape were necessarily excluded. The booming economy of Holland had produced an almost "industrial" landscape in certain areas, especially around Amsterdam (Brown 79-86). There were shipyards, rows of windmills to drain the polders, and factories producing bricks, tiles, soap, rope, and sugar. But none of this economic activity was depicted by the painters, who usually portrayed picturesque rural landscapes. An interesting exception is Allaert van Everdingen's picture of The Arms Factory at Juliatabroeck in Sweden, which depicts a weapons factory owned by the Trip family (Stechow plate 283). The Trips had made a fortune as arms dealers, and this painting was probably intended to hang in their Amsterdam mansion, the Trippenhuis. Not surprisingly, Everdingen tells us nothing about the conditions of the workers in the Trips' factory, just as Ruisdael tells us little about the lives of the cloth-workers in a painting like View of Haarlem with the Bleaching Fields. Indeed, surprisingly few people are shown at work in Dutch landscapes - not even farmers. The countryside is usually depicted as a place of leisure for ice skating, rabbit hunting, messing about in boats, or just pleasantly strolling. This may be because the paintings were mostly bought by town dwellers, who had a nostalgia for life in the country.
Dutch landscape paintings do not usually give faithful records of particular locations. Artists made drawings on the spot, but constructed their paintings back in the studio. And there are many examples of paintings being made months or even years after the preliminary drawings had been made. Saenredam painted the old Town Hall at Amsterdam - which had been destroyed by a fire - using a sketch he had made sixteen years earlier. Van der Heyden made drawings of Brussels and the Rhine Valley and later, back in Holland, turned these scenes into paintings (Stechow 126). An extreme case is that of Frans Post, who lived in Haarlem but painted scenes of Brazil, which was a Dutch colony, using drawings he had made many years before. His pictures usually include exotic fruits and odd-looking animals in the foreground, to emphasise their foreign location.
Painters would frequently try to give an impression of a particular type of landscape - dunes, woods, seaside - rather than depict an actual place. Jan van Goyen, for example, often includes a familiar landmark, such as a church spire, but his paintings are basically impressionistic evocations of typical Dutch scenes such as dunes or boats on the water. Van Goyen's sketchy, tonalistic manner was both practical and artistically effective: it allowed him to produce large numbers of paintings at speed, and it allowed him to evoke the damp, grey climate of Holland in paint. But it is not always raining in Holland, and Van Goyen's fondness for dull weather was due to personal choice, as Max Friedlander points out: "The expression of the countryside was always changing but only with just this expression did it become, for him, pictorially and artistically worth looking at" (Friedlander 91). Van Goyen is not just depicting a familiar landscape, he is also suggesting how he feels about that landscape.
It is true that certain kinds of painting had to be painstakingly accurate, to meet a demand for topographical views of particular places. Good examples are Saenredam's pictures of church interiors, Van der Heyden's views of tree-lined canals in Amsterdam, and Berckheyde's paintings of the town square at Haarlem. But even these paintings are more than just topography. Berckheyde, for example, shows his pride in his native town by depicting a very tidy Haarlem town square on a sunny afternoon, where groups of sober-looking citizens have gathered, all testifying to the orderly life of the town. An emotional attachment to one's native place was surely an important reason for the popularity of such topographical pictures, both with artists and their customers. Jacob van Ruisdael, for example, moved to Amsterdam, but continued to paint views of his native Haarlem - called "Haarlempjes" - and chose to be buried in the Sint Bavokerk in Haarlem. The writer of this essay once had tea with a lady in Spaarndam, who showed me an old painting of the house she lived in and some photographs of herself and her husband standing in front of the old town hall in Haarlem, taken on their wedding day. It is often pointed out that the Dutch of the seventeenth century took a particular pride in their native land because they had recently liberated it from rule by the Spaniards.
There is great diversity in Dutch landscape painting, ranging from the topographical (Berckheyde) to the imaginary (Segers). In the middle stand painters like Jan van Goyen and Salamon van Ruysdael, who give us the "essence" of the Dutch countryside without necessarily giving us a depiction of an actual place. The art historian Rudi Fuchs points out that the river views of Salomon van Ruysdael are more than simple observation because they involve "a conscious aesthetic" (Fuchs 114) which selects and highlights certain elements - although that is an observation that could be applied to a great deal of Dutch painting. The delicacy of Ruysdael's river scenes could be compared to Monet's views of the Seine at Argenteuil. We have here another emotional element in Dutch painting - the love of beauty.
The landscapes of Cornelis Vroom have a lyrical beauty, and it is worth examining one of Vroom's landscapes in detail: An Estuary Seen from a Wooded Rise in the Mauritshuis. This landscape contains elements of the older style - brown foreground, green middle ground, blue background - but here there is a good reason for this, since the blue is the blue of the sea. The composition is framed by a big tree on the right, but - unlike an older landscape - this "wing" is only on one side of the painting. The trees have advanced into the middle of the painting to form a strikingly original and dramatic composition: a view through the trees to a distant estuary. The painting is impressively naturalistic: the trees are carefully delineated - we can recognise the individual species - and their trunks have been bent into interesting shapes by the wind from the sea. The light is clearly that of early morning. Like Ruysdael and Van Goyen, Vroom gives us a carefully arranged "aesthetic" composition - although the boldness of his design anticipates the effects of Jacob van Ruisdael. Vroom's painting is naturalistic, and yet much more than naturalistic, since it gives us the beauty and clarity of a landscape seen in a dream. We can see here why Vroom was such an important influence on Ruisdael.
Jacob van Ruisdael had the ability to convey a dramatic and melancholy mood through scenes of nature - especially changing weather - and commentators have always recognised this. Already in the seventeenth century, Houbracken praised Ruisdael's ability to "portray water splashing or foaming as it dashed on the surrounding rocks" (Slive 22). In the nineteenth century, Fromentin wrote that Ruisdael was the painter "of moving water, of a fleeting cloud, of a bushy tree tormented by the wind" (Fromentin 138). While in our own day, Fuchs wrote that Ruisdael's cloudy skies were one way of introducing "a strong emotional accent" into his paintings (Fuchs 133). As Fuchs rightly points out, paintings like The Mill at Wijk bij Duurstede and the View of Haarlem - both in the Rijksmuseum - convey a sombre mood through their swelling rain clouds; and in both paintings the sun breaks through the clouds in places, illuminating patches of land or water like a spotlight.
These kind of atmospheric effects can be found in most of Ruisdael's landscapes, including the National Gallery's Pool Surrounded by Trees, in which two hunters and their dogs can be glimpsed pursuing a hare through the depths of a forest. If we compare this painting with its possible source - Roelandt Savery's etching of The Deer Hunt (reproduced in Groot) - we can see that Ruisdael is not so interested in the drama of the actual hunt. Savery delights in all the details of the hunt - the hunters with their hunting horn and their spears, the bounding dogs, the fleeing deer - while Ruisdael almost hides his hunters in the depths of the great autumnal forest. One feels that the hunters are but a momentary interruption to the stillness of the forest, which will soon revert to its eternal quietness.
Ships in a stormy sea was another theme which illustrated the power of nature. Also in the National Gallery is Ruisdael's painting of Vessels in a Fresh Breeze, depicting two boats encountering a blustery gale, while waves are dashed against a jetty. Ruisdael must have viewed such a scene many times, when he came to watch the ships sailing into Amsterdam harbour. Ruisdael does not depict the boats in any detail. What interests him is the force of the gale, and the main function of the boats is to illustrate the effect of the wind.
Ruisdael was able to find grandeur in the flat Dutch countryside through taking a humble feature such as a tree, a church spire, or a windmill and highlighting it against the sky. As Jakob Rosenberg says, Ruisdael "strove to achieve heroic effects without making allusions to the South and Antiquity, or sacrificing the individuality of a single tree or bush" (Rosenberg 266). A famous example is the windmill in The Mill at Wijk bij Duurstede, as the height of the mill has been deliberately exaggerated for artistic effect. Another example might be the Church of Saint Bavo (Sint Bavokerk), seen on the horizon of the View of Haarlem. If one takes the train to Bloemendaal or Overveen, it is easy to walk to Het Kopje van Bloemendaal, the highest dune in Holland. When one stands there, the North Sea can be seen on one side, and - on the other side - Haarlem and the Sint Bavokerk can be seen in the distance, even on a rainy day - much as depicted in Ruisdael's painting. But the actual church looks smaller than the one in Ruisdael's painting, and it does not lie neatly on the horizon in the way that Ruisdael has shown it.
A further aspect of Ruisdael's "romanticism" is the fact that he produced a number of purely imaginary landscapes. Ruisdael's scenes of fir trees and waterfalls were inspired by the Swedish views painted by Everdingen, and depict a kind of landscape that Ruisdael had probably never seen with his own eyes. Ruisdael's famous Coup de Soleil in the Louvre is a fantasy landscape containing elements borrowed from Rembrandt's landscapes: a stone bridge, a high mountain, fantastic buildings (Schneider). Ruisdael's Landscape with a Ruined Castle and a Church in the National Gallery includes a very romantic-looking ruin, with swans swimming round it, set down - rather oddly - in the middle of the Dutch countryside.
The ruin may suggest the transience of life, and Ruisdael's paintings probably contain elements of symbolism. The two versions of The Jewish Cemetery - inspired by a real cemetery that Ruisdael had seen just outside Amsterdam, at Ouderkerk - depict tombs, a ruined church, a flowing stream (transience?), and a rainbow (salvation?). Such a heavily symbolic landscape anticipates the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, a German painter who worked in the early nineteenth century. Friedrich's Winter Landscape in the National Gallery depicts a cripple who has flung away his crutches and is now kneeling in prayer before a large wooden crucifix, while, in the background, a Gothic church looms through the mist. Ruisdael never again painted such an obviously symbolic picture as The Jewish Cemetery. Yet it is quite possible that much of his other work contains elements of symbolism, since his fondness for trees in autumn, dead birch trees, approaching rain clouds, and ships in a storm could all serve to suggest the transience of life. This would be very compatible with Dutch Calvinism's insistence on the fleeting nature of all worldly things.
Ruisdael's melancholy tone is not typical of Dutch landscape painting as a whole, which tends to be serene and untroubled, although Rembrandt and Segers produced a number of moody, disturbing landscapes. As Wolfgang Stechow has pointed out (Stechow 111), Ruisdael is also untypical in that his landscapes do not emphasise the presence of people. Other painters show us travellers outside an inn (Ruysdael), farmers and their cattle (Cuyp), and skaters on the ice (Avercamp). But Ruisdael's landscapes usually contain fewer and smaller figures or, occasionally, no figures at all. Ruisdael sees man as dwarfed by nature. A good example is Ruisdael's treatment of Winter. Avercamp and Van der Neer show us crowds of people skating happily on the ice, but Ruisdael's Winter Landscape in the Rijksmuseum depicts a few solitary figures trudging through the cold of a bleak and bitter day.
Because he was in some ways untypical, Ruisdael was not fully appreciated in his own time, and it is probably the case that his greatness was not recognised until the Romantic era. Goethe admired Ruisdael's Jewish Cemetery, Turner and Friedrich both studied Ruisdael's paintings, and Constable praised Ruisdael for his portrayal of "solemn days" with "large rolling clouds" (Vaughan 146,166,196).
The great diversity of Dutch landscape painting makes it difficult to generalise about it, but it does seem that the majority of painters produced idealised images of the familiar topography of Holland, while a number of others, such as Rembrandt and Segers, produced "unrealistic", fantasy landscapes. It was the particular genius of Ruisdael to take the familiar topography and infuse it with grandeur and emotion.
Works Cited
Brown, Christopher, and others, Dutch Landscape: The Early Years - Haarlem and Amsterdam 1590-1650, London: National Gallery, 1986 (exhibition catalogue)
Friedlander, Max J., Landscape, Portrait, Still-life, Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1949
Fromentin, Eugene, The Masters of Past Time: Dutch and Flemish Painting from Van Eyck to Rembrandt, Oxford: Phaidon, 2nd ed.1981
Fuchs, R. H., Dutch Painting, London: Thames & Hudson, 1978
Groot, Irene de, Landscape Etchings by the Dutch Masters of the Seventeenth Century, London: Gordon Fraser, 1979
Rosenberg, Jakob, and others, Dutch Art and Architecture 1600-1800, London; Penguin, 3rd ed. 1977
Schneider, Cynthia P., Rembrandt's Landscapes, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990
Slive, Seymour, Jacob van Ruisdael, New York: Abbeville Press, 1981 (exhibition catalogue)
Stechow, Wolfgang, Dutch Landscape Painting of the Seventeenth Century, New York: Phaidon, 2nd ed. 1968
Vaughan, William, Romanticism and Art, London: Thames & Hudson, 2nd ed. 1994
In addition to the subjects just mentioned, there were many others, including winter scenes, the seaside, ships at sea, and town squares. Dutch painters depicted a familiar topography, but they were selective in their choice of subjects and presented these chosen subjects in a somewhat idealised manner. Their main aim was to produce saleable pictures, pleasing images to hang on the wall. Thus many features of the actual Dutch landscape were necessarily excluded. The booming economy of Holland had produced an almost "industrial" landscape in certain areas, especially around Amsterdam (Brown 79-86). There were shipyards, rows of windmills to drain the polders, and factories producing bricks, tiles, soap, rope, and sugar. But none of this economic activity was depicted by the painters, who usually portrayed picturesque rural landscapes. An interesting exception is Allaert van Everdingen's picture of The Arms Factory at Juliatabroeck in Sweden, which depicts a weapons factory owned by the Trip family (Stechow plate 283). The Trips had made a fortune as arms dealers, and this painting was probably intended to hang in their Amsterdam mansion, the Trippenhuis. Not surprisingly, Everdingen tells us nothing about the conditions of the workers in the Trips' factory, just as Ruisdael tells us little about the lives of the cloth-workers in a painting like View of Haarlem with the Bleaching Fields. Indeed, surprisingly few people are shown at work in Dutch landscapes - not even farmers. The countryside is usually depicted as a place of leisure for ice skating, rabbit hunting, messing about in boats, or just pleasantly strolling. This may be because the paintings were mostly bought by town dwellers, who had a nostalgia for life in the country.
Dutch landscape paintings do not usually give faithful records of particular locations. Artists made drawings on the spot, but constructed their paintings back in the studio. And there are many examples of paintings being made months or even years after the preliminary drawings had been made. Saenredam painted the old Town Hall at Amsterdam - which had been destroyed by a fire - using a sketch he had made sixteen years earlier. Van der Heyden made drawings of Brussels and the Rhine Valley and later, back in Holland, turned these scenes into paintings (Stechow 126). An extreme case is that of Frans Post, who lived in Haarlem but painted scenes of Brazil, which was a Dutch colony, using drawings he had made many years before. His pictures usually include exotic fruits and odd-looking animals in the foreground, to emphasise their foreign location.
Painters would frequently try to give an impression of a particular type of landscape - dunes, woods, seaside - rather than depict an actual place. Jan van Goyen, for example, often includes a familiar landmark, such as a church spire, but his paintings are basically impressionistic evocations of typical Dutch scenes such as dunes or boats on the water. Van Goyen's sketchy, tonalistic manner was both practical and artistically effective: it allowed him to produce large numbers of paintings at speed, and it allowed him to evoke the damp, grey climate of Holland in paint. But it is not always raining in Holland, and Van Goyen's fondness for dull weather was due to personal choice, as Max Friedlander points out: "The expression of the countryside was always changing but only with just this expression did it become, for him, pictorially and artistically worth looking at" (Friedlander 91). Van Goyen is not just depicting a familiar landscape, he is also suggesting how he feels about that landscape.
It is true that certain kinds of painting had to be painstakingly accurate, to meet a demand for topographical views of particular places. Good examples are Saenredam's pictures of church interiors, Van der Heyden's views of tree-lined canals in Amsterdam, and Berckheyde's paintings of the town square at Haarlem. But even these paintings are more than just topography. Berckheyde, for example, shows his pride in his native town by depicting a very tidy Haarlem town square on a sunny afternoon, where groups of sober-looking citizens have gathered, all testifying to the orderly life of the town. An emotional attachment to one's native place was surely an important reason for the popularity of such topographical pictures, both with artists and their customers. Jacob van Ruisdael, for example, moved to Amsterdam, but continued to paint views of his native Haarlem - called "Haarlempjes" - and chose to be buried in the Sint Bavokerk in Haarlem. The writer of this essay once had tea with a lady in Spaarndam, who showed me an old painting of the house she lived in and some photographs of herself and her husband standing in front of the old town hall in Haarlem, taken on their wedding day. It is often pointed out that the Dutch of the seventeenth century took a particular pride in their native land because they had recently liberated it from rule by the Spaniards.
There is great diversity in Dutch landscape painting, ranging from the topographical (Berckheyde) to the imaginary (Segers). In the middle stand painters like Jan van Goyen and Salamon van Ruysdael, who give us the "essence" of the Dutch countryside without necessarily giving us a depiction of an actual place. The art historian Rudi Fuchs points out that the river views of Salomon van Ruysdael are more than simple observation because they involve "a conscious aesthetic" (Fuchs 114) which selects and highlights certain elements - although that is an observation that could be applied to a great deal of Dutch painting. The delicacy of Ruysdael's river scenes could be compared to Monet's views of the Seine at Argenteuil. We have here another emotional element in Dutch painting - the love of beauty.
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| Cornelis Vroom, Estuary seen from a Wooded Rise, Mauritshuis, Hague |
The landscapes of Cornelis Vroom have a lyrical beauty, and it is worth examining one of Vroom's landscapes in detail: An Estuary Seen from a Wooded Rise in the Mauritshuis. This landscape contains elements of the older style - brown foreground, green middle ground, blue background - but here there is a good reason for this, since the blue is the blue of the sea. The composition is framed by a big tree on the right, but - unlike an older landscape - this "wing" is only on one side of the painting. The trees have advanced into the middle of the painting to form a strikingly original and dramatic composition: a view through the trees to a distant estuary. The painting is impressively naturalistic: the trees are carefully delineated - we can recognise the individual species - and their trunks have been bent into interesting shapes by the wind from the sea. The light is clearly that of early morning. Like Ruysdael and Van Goyen, Vroom gives us a carefully arranged "aesthetic" composition - although the boldness of his design anticipates the effects of Jacob van Ruisdael. Vroom's painting is naturalistic, and yet much more than naturalistic, since it gives us the beauty and clarity of a landscape seen in a dream. We can see here why Vroom was such an important influence on Ruisdael.
Jacob van Ruisdael had the ability to convey a dramatic and melancholy mood through scenes of nature - especially changing weather - and commentators have always recognised this. Already in the seventeenth century, Houbracken praised Ruisdael's ability to "portray water splashing or foaming as it dashed on the surrounding rocks" (Slive 22). In the nineteenth century, Fromentin wrote that Ruisdael was the painter "of moving water, of a fleeting cloud, of a bushy tree tormented by the wind" (Fromentin 138). While in our own day, Fuchs wrote that Ruisdael's cloudy skies were one way of introducing "a strong emotional accent" into his paintings (Fuchs 133). As Fuchs rightly points out, paintings like The Mill at Wijk bij Duurstede and the View of Haarlem - both in the Rijksmuseum - convey a sombre mood through their swelling rain clouds; and in both paintings the sun breaks through the clouds in places, illuminating patches of land or water like a spotlight.
 |
| Jacob van Ruisdael, Pool Surrounded by Trees, National Gallery, London |
Ships in a stormy sea was another theme which illustrated the power of nature. Also in the National Gallery is Ruisdael's painting of Vessels in a Fresh Breeze, depicting two boats encountering a blustery gale, while waves are dashed against a jetty. Ruisdael must have viewed such a scene many times, when he came to watch the ships sailing into Amsterdam harbour. Ruisdael does not depict the boats in any detail. What interests him is the force of the gale, and the main function of the boats is to illustrate the effect of the wind.
Ruisdael was able to find grandeur in the flat Dutch countryside through taking a humble feature such as a tree, a church spire, or a windmill and highlighting it against the sky. As Jakob Rosenberg says, Ruisdael "strove to achieve heroic effects without making allusions to the South and Antiquity, or sacrificing the individuality of a single tree or bush" (Rosenberg 266). A famous example is the windmill in The Mill at Wijk bij Duurstede, as the height of the mill has been deliberately exaggerated for artistic effect. Another example might be the Church of Saint Bavo (Sint Bavokerk), seen on the horizon of the View of Haarlem. If one takes the train to Bloemendaal or Overveen, it is easy to walk to Het Kopje van Bloemendaal, the highest dune in Holland. When one stands there, the North Sea can be seen on one side, and - on the other side - Haarlem and the Sint Bavokerk can be seen in the distance, even on a rainy day - much as depicted in Ruisdael's painting. But the actual church looks smaller than the one in Ruisdael's painting, and it does not lie neatly on the horizon in the way that Ruisdael has shown it.
A further aspect of Ruisdael's "romanticism" is the fact that he produced a number of purely imaginary landscapes. Ruisdael's scenes of fir trees and waterfalls were inspired by the Swedish views painted by Everdingen, and depict a kind of landscape that Ruisdael had probably never seen with his own eyes. Ruisdael's famous Coup de Soleil in the Louvre is a fantasy landscape containing elements borrowed from Rembrandt's landscapes: a stone bridge, a high mountain, fantastic buildings (Schneider). Ruisdael's Landscape with a Ruined Castle and a Church in the National Gallery includes a very romantic-looking ruin, with swans swimming round it, set down - rather oddly - in the middle of the Dutch countryside.
The ruin may suggest the transience of life, and Ruisdael's paintings probably contain elements of symbolism. The two versions of The Jewish Cemetery - inspired by a real cemetery that Ruisdael had seen just outside Amsterdam, at Ouderkerk - depict tombs, a ruined church, a flowing stream (transience?), and a rainbow (salvation?). Such a heavily symbolic landscape anticipates the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, a German painter who worked in the early nineteenth century. Friedrich's Winter Landscape in the National Gallery depicts a cripple who has flung away his crutches and is now kneeling in prayer before a large wooden crucifix, while, in the background, a Gothic church looms through the mist. Ruisdael never again painted such an obviously symbolic picture as The Jewish Cemetery. Yet it is quite possible that much of his other work contains elements of symbolism, since his fondness for trees in autumn, dead birch trees, approaching rain clouds, and ships in a storm could all serve to suggest the transience of life. This would be very compatible with Dutch Calvinism's insistence on the fleeting nature of all worldly things.
Ruisdael's melancholy tone is not typical of Dutch landscape painting as a whole, which tends to be serene and untroubled, although Rembrandt and Segers produced a number of moody, disturbing landscapes. As Wolfgang Stechow has pointed out (Stechow 111), Ruisdael is also untypical in that his landscapes do not emphasise the presence of people. Other painters show us travellers outside an inn (Ruysdael), farmers and their cattle (Cuyp), and skaters on the ice (Avercamp). But Ruisdael's landscapes usually contain fewer and smaller figures or, occasionally, no figures at all. Ruisdael sees man as dwarfed by nature. A good example is Ruisdael's treatment of Winter. Avercamp and Van der Neer show us crowds of people skating happily on the ice, but Ruisdael's Winter Landscape in the Rijksmuseum depicts a few solitary figures trudging through the cold of a bleak and bitter day.
Because he was in some ways untypical, Ruisdael was not fully appreciated in his own time, and it is probably the case that his greatness was not recognised until the Romantic era. Goethe admired Ruisdael's Jewish Cemetery, Turner and Friedrich both studied Ruisdael's paintings, and Constable praised Ruisdael for his portrayal of "solemn days" with "large rolling clouds" (Vaughan 146,166,196).
The great diversity of Dutch landscape painting makes it difficult to generalise about it, but it does seem that the majority of painters produced idealised images of the familiar topography of Holland, while a number of others, such as Rembrandt and Segers, produced "unrealistic", fantasy landscapes. It was the particular genius of Ruisdael to take the familiar topography and infuse it with grandeur and emotion.
Works Cited
Brown, Christopher, and others, Dutch Landscape: The Early Years - Haarlem and Amsterdam 1590-1650, London: National Gallery, 1986 (exhibition catalogue)
Friedlander, Max J., Landscape, Portrait, Still-life, Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1949
Fromentin, Eugene, The Masters of Past Time: Dutch and Flemish Painting from Van Eyck to Rembrandt, Oxford: Phaidon, 2nd ed.1981
Fuchs, R. H., Dutch Painting, London: Thames & Hudson, 1978
Groot, Irene de, Landscape Etchings by the Dutch Masters of the Seventeenth Century, London: Gordon Fraser, 1979
Rosenberg, Jakob, and others, Dutch Art and Architecture 1600-1800, London; Penguin, 3rd ed. 1977
Schneider, Cynthia P., Rembrandt's Landscapes, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990
Slive, Seymour, Jacob van Ruisdael, New York: Abbeville Press, 1981 (exhibition catalogue)
Stechow, Wolfgang, Dutch Landscape Painting of the Seventeenth Century, New York: Phaidon, 2nd ed. 1968
Vaughan, William, Romanticism and Art, London: Thames & Hudson, 2nd ed. 1994
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