Jacob van Ruisdael

Jacob van Ruisdael is often regarded as the single most important landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age in the seventeenth century, the place and moment where landscape painting first came into its own. Van Ruisdael exerted an influence on such landscape artists as John Constable as well as the French Impressionists. This exhibition will include approximately forty-five paintings, thirty drawings, and all thirteen of van Ruisdael’s rare etchings.

He trained with his uncle Salomon and produced his first paintings in 1646 when he was sixteen or seventeen. The densely wooded scenes of his early period give way to the more spacious and diverse compositions of his later years. Van Ruisdael painted the dunes, seashore, marshes, and forests around Haarlem, but also the more dramatic topography of Germany and even Scandinavia, a place he never actually visited but knew from other artists’ work. The tension between fiction and truth became more pronounced in his paintings than in any previous landscape art, creating a kind of landscape rich in accurate observation of the natural world and imbued with evocative symbolism. Considered the inventor of the Romantic landscape, his Jewish Cemetery, the most stirring and monumental of his imaginary scenes, transformed a humble graveyard near Amsterdam into astonishing allegories of the transience of life.

Collectors in seventeenth-century Holland preferred landscapes to any other genre of painting. Van Ruisdael’s landscapes were especially sought after, and his fame in his own time is comparable to that of the French Impressionist Monet today. This exhibition will allow modern viewers to rediscover the breathtaking beauty of one of the greatest and most beloved practitioners of landscape art.

The exhibition is organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London in collaboration with Seymour Slive, Gleason Professor of Fine Arts emeritus at Harvard University and former Director of the Harvard University Art Museums, who will contribute the catalogue that will accompany the exhibition. A world-renowned expert on Dutch art, Slive has written extensively on Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and van Ruisdael.

Organizers This exhibition has been jointly organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It is supported in part by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Pressetext

Jacob van Ruisdael: Dutch Master of Landscape
Kurator: Lloyd DeWitt