Ruisdael’s majestic forest landscape overpowers the viewer with its large scale and the forcefulness of the image. The view is across a broad waterfall to a forest glade, in which a small flock of sheep grazes. In the middle distance, a man and a woman travel along a path that crosses the rolling hillside. The figures, however, seem all but insignificant in comparison to the massive trees and rocks that surround them. The broad, rocky ledge with its waterfall and gigantic, broken birch trees in the foreground is at once forbidding and foreboding. On a rock outcropping to the right, a huge oak tree, its roots grappling for support and nourishment, towers above the forest. The stark, gray, cloudy sky and deep greenish hues of the foliage underscore the painting’s somber mood.
Ruisdael painted such forest scenes of water roaring over a rocky ledge many times during his long and productive career. As suggested by the half-timbered house visible in a similar landscape in Frankfurt [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] Jacob van Ruisdael, Forest Scene with Waterfall, mid-1650s, oil on canvas, Städelsches Kunstinstitut Frankfurt. Photo: Ursula Edelmann, he may have encountered such landscape elements on his travels along the Dutch-German border in the early 1650s. The National Gallery of Art’s painting also shares compositional characteristics with a landscape with a waterfall by Ruisdael in the Uffizi, Florence [fig. 2]
[fig. 2] Jacob van Ruisdael, Landscape with Waterfall, 1670s, oil on canvas, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, including the diminutive figures and sheep.
Few of Ruisdael’s paintings after 1653 are dated, so a precise chronology of his work is not possible. The general evolution of his style and range of interests, though, is now understood, and a framework exists for placing his works within certain time periods. The Uffizi painting, with its loose brushwork and more open composition, belongs to the 1670s, while the National Gallery’s landscape with its closed composition and densely painted trees, is characteristic of works from the mid-1650s. Also distinctive for this earlier period of Ruisdael’s career is the combination of the scene’s rather heavy and somber mood and the delicacy of the artist’s painterly touch. In this work, for example, he carefully articulated individual blades of grass and leaves, patterns of bark, and the flow of the water cascading over the rocks.
In many respects Forest Scene shares characteristics with The Jewish Cemetery in Dresden [fig. 3]
[fig. 3] Jacob van Ruisdael, The Jewish Cemetery, mid-1650s, oil on canvas, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. Photo: Elke Estel / Hans-Peter Klut. Although the subject and lighting effects are more dramatic in the Dresden painting than in Forest Scene, the mood, the closed composition, and the descriptive character of Ruisdael’s technique for rendering details are comparable. The two paintings even share certain motifs, such as the presence of wild viburnum growing along the edge of the forest. The date of The Jewish Cemetery has been much debated, with suggestions ranging from 1653/1655 to 1679. A broad consensus, however, places it and the Detroit version of the same subject in the mid-1650s, a date likewise appropriate for the National Gallery’s work.
Given the compositional and stylistic similarities between Forest Scene and The Jewish Cemetery, one must also ask whether thematic ones exist as well. As has been frequently discussed, the presence of tombs, ruins, broken tree trunks, dead birches, and rainbows in the two versions of The Jewish Cemetery have explicit allegorical significance. They allude to the transience of life, particularly the temporal nature of man’s endeavors, and also to the hope for renewed growth. Similar symbolic allusions to the power and force of the cycle of nature were almost certainly attached to the compositional elements of the National Gallery’s painting. The dramatic forms of the tree stumps and the fallen birch trees establish the scene’s tenor, but directly behind them grow the viburnum bushes that flower in the spring, the time of life’s renewal. The stream itself, which also has a symbolic function in The Jewish Cemetery, traditionally has served as a metaphor for the continuum of the forces of nature.
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.
April 24, 2014
