Jacob van Ruisdael - Landscape with Tall Trees, a Fisherman, and Shepherds - image-1

Lot 1583 Dα

Jacob van Ruisdael - Landscape with Tall Trees, a Fisherman, and Shepherds

Auction 1118 - overview Cologne
17.11.2018, 11:00 - Old Master Paintings and Drawings / Sculpture
Estimate: 100.000 € - 120.000 €
Result: 111.600 € (incl. premium)

Jacob van Ruisdael

Landscape with Tall Trees, a Fisherman, and Shepherds

Oil on canvas (relined). 67.5 x 54 cm.
Signed lower right: JRuisdael (JR conjoined).

As Jakob Rosenberg once wrote, Jakob van Ruisdael was the Dutch artist who most developed a sense for the beauty of the forest. During his long career, the artist painted forests again and again, developing an impressive variety of motifs and compositions. Rosenberg stated that, for painters, the difficulty in representing a forest landscape lies in creating a "spatially clear representation of the interior of the forest" and "combining sufficient lighting and spatial clarity with the unity inherent in the impression of the interior of the forest" (Rosenberg, op. cit., p. 48).

This forest landscape, once owned by the Hamburger Kunsthalle and to be dated to the 1670s, can be seen as Jakob van Ruisdael's successful answer to both of these creative questions. It captivates with its clarity of composition, subtlety of colour, and economy in the use of artistic means. At the same time it impresses us with its immediacy and closeness to nature, qualities which were already admired in Ruisdael's paintings by his contemporaries.

The artist eschews the use of a dominant motif, such as a mighty oak tree, to form a focal point of the composition. Instead, the viewer looks into a forest of slender deciduous trees. In the centre, a man stands by a pond fishing, and a path leads up to a dune. Ruisdael defines the pictorial space with just a few elements: Through the staggering of the trees, the arrangement of the figural staffage (the angler in the foreground, the shepherds in the mid-ground, and the hunter on the dunes in the background) as well as the path that meanders into the distance and directs the viewer's gaze. On the surface, the scenery appears fairly unimpressive; but it is precisely this, the unimposing nature of the motif, that makes the representation of the forest appear so close to life. The artist unconsciously directs our attention to the rich palette of brown and green tones with which he depicts the trees, the branches, the leaves, and the ground. With regard to the "sufficient lighting", which Rosenberg saw as a potential compositional problem, one notices that Ruisdael refrains from animating the interior of the forest with the interplay of light and shadow, for example through the representation of a clearing. The depiction of pictorial light is limited to the sky, where the bright blue and the white and grey tones of the clouds, illuminated from the right by the sun, form a vivid backdrop for the representation of the forest below.

Provenance

J. Amsinck, Hamburg. – Bequeathed to the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg 1879. – Karl Haberstock, Berlin, 1931. – E. Slatter, London 1951. – Sir Harold A. Wenher, London. – Auctioned by Christie´s, London, 27.6.1975, lot 74. – Kunsthandel Xaver Scheidwimmer, Munich, 1976. – South German private collection.

Literature

Hamburger Kunsthalle: Katalog der Alten Meister. Hamburg 1921. - Cornelis Hofstede de Groot: Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts. Esslingen, 1911, vol. 4, no. 1045. - Jacob Rosenberg: Jacob van Ruisdael, Berlin 1928, Nr. 300. - Seymour Slive: Jacob van Ruisdael. A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, Drawings, and Etchings, New Haven & London 2001, p. 290, no. 377.