In this landscape Ruisdael has depicted a view across a small waterfall that transforms a smoothly flowing river into a turbulent stream. As the water rushes toward the lower left foreground it passes under a wooden bridge that is traversed by a mother and child and their dog. The path they follow enters a densely forested, somewhat hilly terrain, passing by three large oak trees that dominate the center of the composition. One of these trees is almost dead, and another has a dramatically broken branch hanging precariously over the falls.
Ruisdael often composed his scenes to limit the viewer’s easy access into the landscape. In this painting the land across the river can be reached only by way of the bridge, but the juncture of the bridge and the near shore does not occur within the picture. The effect is to make the landscape unapproachable and forbidding, a mood intensified by the dense forest on the far shore and the steel gray clouds overhead. As in Ruisdael’s painting The Jewish Cemetery [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] Jacob van Ruisdael, The Jewish Cemetery, mid-1650s, oil on canvas, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. Photo: Elke Estel / Hans-Peter Klut and his Forest Scene, the juxtaposition of dead and broken trees with a stream flowing turbulently through a rocky landscape is probably an allegorical reference to the transience of life.
Despite Ruisdael’s compositional schema and the presence of these allusions to metaphysical elements, the mood of the painting is less ominous than in comparable scenes. In large part the difference is one of scale. Not only is the painting relatively small, but also the forms themselves are not as massive and overpowering as in, for example, the Forest Scene. The landscape elements, moreover, are delicately painted. The branches of the trees are not formed with the contorted rhythms of those in Ruisdael’s paintings from the early part of his career. Nuances of light on the leaves and branches of the trees are softly indicated with deft touches of the brush. These qualities, consistent with those of Ruisdael’s later period, suggest that he probably executed this work around 1670, when he turned from the turbulent, vertical waterfall scenes of the preceding decade to more peaceful compositions in a horizontal format.
Ruisdael often adapted and modified motifs from one work to another. A landscape with a similar waterfall occurs in a painting of almost identical dimensions, also dated around 1670, that was formerly in a private collection in Oklahoma City. The bridge is of a type found often in his works, for example, in his landscapes in the Frick Collection, New York, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. The figure group on the bridge also appears in a different setting in his Wooded and Hilly Landscape in the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.
April 24, 2014
