Word: ruisdael
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...forms of the Arlesian landscape, its patchwork of fields and tree-lined roads, were already embedded in his Dutch background-"it reminds one of Holland: everything is flat, only one thinks rather of the Holland of Ruisdael or Hobbema than of Holland as it is"-but the color was like nothing in Van Gogh's previous life. Seeing his desire for "radical" color confirmed in the actual landscape gave him confidence. It affected even those paintings in which no landscape occurs, like the self-portrait of Vincent with a shaved head, gazing not at but past the viewer with...
...wonder that, in a painter with so pronounced a taste for the specific, there was a constant argument between stereotypes and things seen. Constable loved his masters: Claude Lorrain, Ruisdael, Gaspard Poussin. Some of his most delectable paintings, such as The Cornfield, 1826, rely on the Claudean use of dark repoussoir trees framing a view of bright space at the center, and this can make them too charming to a modern eye. Constable himself remarked that The Cornfield "has certainly got a little more eyesalve than I usually condescend to give." But the great fact of nature, as Benjamin West...
...Property. The enameled lawns and bulky cows, the relaxed zigzag of planes leading the eye toward the pink villa, the swans and fishermen riding on a serene sheet of water stitched with silver light: this is the epitome of civilized landscape. Like the best work of Jacob van Ruisdael, the 17th century Dutchman whom Constable considered a master of "natural" vision, Wivenhoe Park manages to be both real and ideal; it is a powerful (though subdued) instrument of fantasy as well as an exact rendition of General Rebow's family seat...
...real reason for its existence that justifies the expense and risk of bringing the work around the world. Only in recent years, with a cluster of major exhibitions devoted to the 17th century-"France in the Golden Age" at the Met, Claude Lorrain at the National Gallery, Ruisdael at the Fogg, and a few others-have Americans been able to clear their minds of prejudices in favor of the quattrocento and see what pleasure the baroque period holds. This show carries that project further...
...Ruisdael's most popular paintings, however, have always tended to be the ones of "natural vision": the vast pearly expanses of flat Dutch land, richly differentiated in light and shadow; and the woodland scenes. Without straining for effect, he hit the exact note over and over again. Even a self-conscious device, like the ocher scar on the old oak that anchors the radiating composition of Hilly Landscape with a Great Oak Tree and a Grain Field, circa 1654, is perfectly assimilated to the other elements of the painting. Such a canvas is pure Ruisdael: the precise...