Jacob van Ruisdael

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Jacob van Ruisdael, woodcut with signature B from the 19th century
Medallion by Jacob Isaackszoon van Ruisdael at the Kunsthalle Hamburg
Oak forest by a lake , Gemäldegalerie Berlin
Signature of Jakob van Ruisdael, 1646

Jacob Isaackszoon van Ruisdael [ ˈjaːkɔp vɑn ˈrœysdaːl ] (* around 1628/29 in Haarlem ; buried March 14, 1682 there ) was a Dutch baroque landscape painter and etcher .

life and work

Very little is known about the life of Jacob van Ruisdael, but his oeuvre, which is scattered across museums and collections around the world, is comparatively large. He was the only son of the landscape painter and frame maker Isaack van Ruisdael , with whom he probably also received his training, as well as the nephew of Salomon van Ruysdael and the cousin of Jacob Salomonsz. van Ruysdael (note the different spelling of the family names!).

So he probably spent his youth in Haarlem, which was a prosperous city with a flourishing beer and textile industry until the middle of the century. Landscape painting was established as an independent genre of Dutch painting around 1600 by Adam Elsheimer and Paul Bril, among others , and was particularly cultivated in affluent Haarlem. (See the article on Dutch landscape painting ).

The 17-year-old's first paintings date back to 1646, and no fewer than 13 signed and dated landscapes have survived from that year. Initially still dependent on the manner of his uncle and his fellow Haarlem contemporaries, z. B. Cornelis Vroom (* 1590) or Pieter de Molijn (* 1595), Ruisdael quickly found his own style. It is characterized by dramatic accents through high-contrast lighting, powerful image motifs and the differentiated rendering of natural forms. Exact observations of nature in the forest and dune landscape around Haarlem are reflected in the preserved hand drawings, which, executed in front of the motif, served as the basis for the painterly execution in the studio.

In 1648 he joined the painters' guild in his hometown. With his friend Nicolaes Berchem from Haarlem , he took a trip to Bentheim around 1650 , the castle of which appears in over 30 of his landscapes in the following years. His travels, he was probably several times in the German / Dutch border area, took him not only to Bentheim, but also to Burgsteinfurt, Gildehaus, Schüttorf, Neuenhaus and Singraven near Denekamp (NL).

Since the travels of those years, which also took him through the Netherlands and to the Middle Rhine, the composition of the image in the landscapes of Ruisdael has become even more powerful: majestic trees and imposing cloud formations are combined into sublime compositions. Around 1655 Ruisdael went to Amsterdam, where he became a member of the Reformed Church in 1657 . On January 15, 1659 he acquired the citizenship of Amsterdam , the poorterrecht .

In the 1650s and even more so in the 1660s he was strongly influenced by the waterfall motifs that Allart van Everdingen (he too went from Haarlem to Amsterdam in the 1650s) had brought back from Norway and used in his dramatic, often portrait-format landscapes. Other pictures from the later years offer wide views of the flat country, whereby strong contrasts of light and piled-up clouds stage a cityscape and evoke the idea of ​​a beautiful, but industrious community embedded in nature (in the various views of the bleaching meadows off Haarlem ). Several versions of a gloomy forest swamp or the Jewish cemetery also show a more melancholy aspect in the rich gamut of the painter's possibilities of expression. Waters play a certain role in his work, as Houbraken already emphasized, but pure marine images are rather rare. Topographical reliability is not to be expected in principle from Ruisdael's views; it is usually subordinate to artistic, compositional goals. How realistic he worked in detail, however, shows a direct comparison (which is possible for the art viewer in many galleries) between the foliage precisely painted by Jakob and the summarily spotted vegetation of the trees of his uncle Salomon. The meaning of his motifs always goes beyond the objective, but the possible explanations (e.g. paths as paths of life, mill wings as symbols of the cross, patriotic connotation of the cultivated landscape) that can be inferred from contemporary emblematics , as is often the case in Dutch painting, more variable options than clearly determined definitions.

In 1678 Ruisdael is mentioned as a doctor with a doctorate in Caen , Houbraken confirms this (certainly only brief) occupation. One of his clients was the Amsterdam regent Cornelis de Graeff , which Ruisdael shows when he moves into his Soestdijk estate . On July 8, 1660, Ruisdael stated that the painter Meindest Hobbema had been his apprentice for a few years, and in 1668 he was his best man. On May 23, 1667, he dictated his will to an Amsterdam notary, and on May 27 of the same year he revoked it and appointed his father as the universal heir in the event of his death; van Ruisdael was obviously not married. In 1671 he was the godfather to the baptism of two children of the painter Cornelis Kick . Jacob van Ruisdael probably died in Amsterdam and was posthumously taken to Haarlem and buried there on March 14, 1682.

Ruisdael's work was initially reproduced in copperplate engravings and distributed; Ruisdael etched some sheets himself ; they too may have contributed to the fame of the painter, whose motifs and compositions had a unique influence on landscape painting up to the end of the 19th century.

Works (selection)

The great forest

The most famous works by Jacob van Ruisdael include the following:

  • The Jewish cemetery (1654/55)

  • Hunting (2nd third of the 17th century)

  • Navy (around 1668)

  • Wijk mill near Duurstede (around 1670)

  • Bentheim Castle (1653)

  • Waterfall with Bentheim Castle from the north-west

  • Waterfall with the watchtower (1660/65) Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Braunschweig

literature

  • Nils Büttner, Gerd Unverfetern: Jacob van Ruisdael in Bentheim: A Dutch painter and Bentheim Castle in the 17th century, Bielefeld 1993
  • H. Hagels: The paintings of the Dutch painters Jacob van Ruisdael and Nicolaas van Berchem from Bentheim Castle in relation to the nature of the Bentheimer Land, yearbook of the Heimatverein der Grafschaft Bentheim, 1968, p 41 ff.
  • Zeno Kolks: Article by Jacob van Ruisdael . In: Emsländische Geschichte Vol. 7. Ed. By the Study Society for Emsländische Regionalgeschichte, Dohren 1998, pp. 228–231.
  • EP Richardson: Ruisdael's Landscape with a Water Mill . In: Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts .
  • H. Rosenau: The Dates of Jacob van Ruisdael's “Jewish Cemeteries” . In: Oud-Holland LXXIII, 1958, p. 241 f.
  • Jacob Rosenberg : A Seascape by Jacob van Ruisdael . In: Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston LVI, 1958, pp. 144 ff.
  • Jacob Rosenberg: Jacob van Ruisdael. Berlin 1928
  • Helmut Schönrock: A guild house motif in paintings by Ruisdael . In : Bentheimer Jahrbuch 2000 (Das Bentheimer Land Volume 147) Bad Bentheim, 1999, p. 79 ff.
  • Helmut Schönrock: Jacob van Ruisdael draws Neuenhauser motif . In: Neuenhaus - Views and Insights, series of publications by VHS Grafschaft Bentheim , Vol. 30, Neuenhaus 2011, pp. 70 ff.
  • Seymour Slive : Jacob van Ruisdael. A complete catalog of his paintings, drawings, etchings . New Haven / London 2001.
  • F. Stampfle: An early drawing by Jacob van Ruisdael . In: Art Quarterly XXII, 1959, pp. 161 ff.
  • E. John Walford: Jacob van Ruisdael, New Haven 1991
  • Joseph Eduard Wessely :  Ruisdael, Jacob . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 29, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1889, p. 630 f.
  • Jacob van Ruisdael - The revolution of the landscape . Exhibition catalog Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg 2002. ISBN 90 400 9606 6 .

Web links

Commons : Jacob van Ruisdael  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

supporting documents

  1. ↑ recalculated on the basis of a statement made by him in 1661 that he was 32 years old. After Giltaji 1997
  2. ↑ most recently Jochen Becker: "Een heuchelij vermaak… maar ook een heldre baak" - on different ways of looking at Dutch landscapes , in: Jacob van Ruisdael, cat. Hamburg 2001, pp. 144–152
  3. ^ Arnold Houbraken: De Groote Schouwburgh der Nederlandtsche Kunstschilders en Schilderessen , The Hague 1718–1721, Volume 3, pp. 65f.
  4. ↑ Arrival of Cornelis de Graeff in Soestdijk, painting by Jakob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (GIF file)
personal data
SURNAME Ruisdael, Jacob van
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ruisdael, Jacob Isaackszoon van (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch landscape painter and etcher
DATE OF BIRTH around 1628
PLACE OF BIRTH Haarlem
DATE OF DEATH March 14, 1682
Place of death Haarlem