Lot 1245 Dα

The two oval landscapes are dated 1634. Hence they derive from the decade that was of eminent importance for the development of Dutch landscape painting, in which a young generation of paintings developed a new concept of the rendition of nature. One painting shows a farmstead with horse and cart and peasants, the other a river with a ferryboat transporting cattle and peasants. The composition of the two paintings obviously refer to each other, and it seems as if the artist wanted to demonstrate what the new form of landscape painting had achieved.
The river landscape indicates the elements of this new landscape painting. A diagonal line, formed by the trees at the embankment, connects the fore-, middle- and the background, creating a unified pictorial space. The diagonal at the same time leads the eye towards the distance, where the silhouette of a town can be seen. The horizon is extremely low, so that the depiction of the sky and the clouds are allowed plenty of space. How bold the conception of the pictorial space is can be seen by the fact that the foreground consists only of the rendition of the water. This enables the artist to depict the reflections of the sky, the trees, and the figures in the water. Altogether, the ephemeral phenomena of nature - air, wind, water, light - in their fleetingness, are the protagonists of these landscape paintings. The unified pictorial space, the reduction of the palette to a few green, grey and brown tones and the rendition of elements visualise the atmosphere, the width and depth of the landscape in a new way.
A comparable pair of landscapes exists that was painted the previous year (fig. 1 and 2; Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden). Its composition is, except for a few details, simlar to these paintings. Ruysdael was probably aware of the aethetic impression that the juxtaposition of two oval paintings, representing two different types of landscapes, made on beholders.