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Lot description
Monogrammed lower left: JR Between steep, tree-lined banks, a stream flows from the background of the picture towards the viewer, right up to their feet, so to speak – an unusual composition and yet a characteristic work by the great Dutch landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael. A dense backdrop of trees stands out against a bright, cloud-streaked sky. Jacob van Ruisdael is a master of lush, leafy trees, gnarled trunks and cascading water. However, he did not actually see these landscapes for himself. Having initially painted flat, sandy landscapes such as those found in the vicinity of his hometown of Haarlem, by the early 1650s he was producing paintings depicting scenes that had been witnessed not by him, but by his contemporary Allart van Everdingen in Scandinavia. Van Ruisdael elevated van Everdingen’s models to the heroic, thereby establishing his own expressive style, which has lost none of its appeal to this day. Seymour Slive dates this almost square painting to the late 1650s; it thus belongs to his finest creative period.