Jacob van Ruisdael

Jacob was born in Haarlem into an artistic milieu. His father Isaack was a frame-maker, art dealer and a talented but little-known painter. His uncle Salomon was a prominent Haarlem artist, particularly known for his river landscapes. Salomon and Isaack signed with Ruysdael, while later Jacob used a slightly differently spelling, Ruisdael.

No sign of clumsiness or hesitation can be detected in Jacob’s earliest known landscapes, which are signed and dated 1646. They also demonstrate that the precocious teenager worked as an independent master even before he joined the Haarlem Guild of St Luke two years later. Especially at the beginning of his career, Ruisdael painted many dune landscapes, such as this one, with a sandy track winding through the dune.

In the early 1650s the young Ruisdael travelled to the border region of the eastern Netherlands with Germany. A glance at a map reveals that he did not venture far from home. As the crow flies, it is about 175 kilometres from Haarlem to the region where he found motifs that soon became a fixed part of his repertoire, such as majestic waterfalls. For this picture, however, he also derived inspiration from paintings and drawings by his confrère Caesar van Everdingen.

Fantasy and reality merge together in Ruisdael’s work. For example, he painted more than a dozen pictures of Bentheim Castle, which can still be admired in the German-Dutch border region, but set it in a different mountain landscape each time. In this scene the castle makes a more imposing impression than it does in real life, and such high mountains are not found there.

Ruisdael left behind a varied oeuvre of not only forest and dune landscapes, but also city- and seascapes. Furthermore, about 25 winter landscapes are known. Notice the ominous dark clouds, which are lit from the left by the low sun. A cheerful crowd of ice skaters would be out of place in such a winter landscape by Ruisdael.

That Ruisdael had an apprentice emerges from a single document, a statement he made on 8 July 1660, namely Meindert Hobbema, who had ‘served and trained for some years’ with him. Eight years later Ruisdael served as a witness to his marriage, suggesting that the master and his remarkably talented pupil had remained friends.

Ruisdael painted a number of views of Haarlem, also known as ‘Haerlempjes’ (Little Haarlems). The tall roof of the church of St Bavo rises in the distance. At the foot of the dunes in the foreground are long lengths of linen bleaching in the sun. The Haarlem linen industry used the pure dune water for this purpose.

The mill rises up majestically, defying the dark rain clouds and dwarfing the castle and the church of Wijk bij Duurstede. The Lek River flows in the foreground. This painting is famous worldwide, and rightly so. Ruisdael combined all the Dutch elements in it – the lowlands, the water and the sky – in an impressive way, and has them converge in the equally Dutch windmill.

Postcards of The windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede have been among the Rijksmuseum shop’s bestsellers for over a century. Artists of later generations also admired this picture: it was copied more often by both up-and-coming and accomplished artists than any other work in the museum galleries.

This painting was part of a ‘historical gallery’, a collection of paintings and sculptures glorifying Dutch art. Ruisdael was one of the 17th-century artists to be honoured with such a painting by Albert Gerard Bilders in 1864. It depicts the 17th-century master in the open air sketching a watermill, one of his favourite motifs.