Word: ruisdael
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Meanwhile, the show in the existing Fogg continued to prove the worth of the museum. It is a retrospective-improbably enough, the only one ever held-of 56 paintings by Jacob van Ruisdael, who was by general consent the greatest landscape painter to live in 17th century Holland. It will not go elsewhere in the U.S., so anyone with a serious interest in the art of landscape should get to the Fogg before April 11. We see Ruisdael entire, for the first and perhaps the last time. The man, however, disappears behind the work. Little is known of his life...
...this shadowy creature changed some of the history of European art. There was landscape before Ruisdael and landscape after him; his vision exerted a subtle, intrusive pressure on Dutch, French and English painters well into the 19th century. The idea that landscape did not have to be "moralized" as allegory or treated merely as a background to royal portraits or Crucifixions-that it could be seen and loved for its own sake, as the repository of unburnished natural truth-was widely confirmed by Ruisdael's work...
Many of his best pictures were hung in England. Gainsborough copied his gnarled-oak thickets; Turner's early marine paintings were done under the partial spell of Ruisdael's sea pieces, his slim parallelograms of rusty sail leaning on the wind-chopped estuary. Most of all, John Constable was inspired by his sense of nature seen fresh, without evident convention: the patches of scudding sunlight on wheat fields, the broken arc of a rainbow, the painterly delight in filling three-quarters of a canvas with high piling clouds. Time and again, one sees images in Constable that might...
...this exhibition is not so much an epiphany as the great 1976 Constable show in London, the reason is that impressionism taught us to put light, more than anything else, in landscape; Constable's surface, dewed with points of white and radiantly matinal, seems "truer" than Ruisdael's. We no longer want meadows to have, as some English academician is supposed to have said, the color of an old violin. But if one views Ruisdael's work against the conventions of his own day, it is easier to understand how original he really was-how inventive...
...Ruisdael was not an on-the-spot painter. His landscapes are "composites," made up in the studio from sketches, memory and imagination; there is no finding the spot where Ruisdael "really" stood on the shore of the IJ. Some places he painted without seeing them at all. The Dutch market, in the late 1650s, had a vogue for Scandinavian waterfalls; Ruisdael obligingly painted about a hundred of them, undeterred by the fact that he had never been north of Holland. His Haarlempjes, or "Views of Haarlem," were also bread and butter; their usual format is one of the best-loved...