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Jacob van Ruisdael
Haarlem 1628 - Amsterdam 1682
Sunset in a Wood
Oil on canvas 62.8 x 75.3 cm
Signed lower right ‘Ruisdael’
Provenance:
Charles Scarisbrick (d. 1860), Scarisbrick Hall, Lancashire; London, Christie’s, May 1861 (90 gns to the Earl of Dudley). William, 1st Earl of Dudley (1817-1885), Dudley House, Park Lane, London,Christie’s, 7 April 1876, lot 109 as ‘Jacob Ruysdael’(44 gns to Waters). Sir Stuart Duke-Elder. Martin Assher, before 1970. With Arthur Tooth, London. English private collection.
Literature
C. Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the works of the most Eminent Dutch Painters of the17th Century, vol IV, London, 1912, p.236, no. 742d.
Netherlandish landscape painting reached its apogee in Jacob van Ruisdael’s mature work. His views of bleaching fields, waterfalls and woods, painted in the 1660s, have often been called “classical”. They set the standard for all European painters who during the next two centuries, until the advent of Impressionism and modern art, aspired to the truthful rendition of the essence of landscape. This applies to John Constable and Gustave Courbet as well as to Caspar David Friedrich.
Sunset in a Wood is an excellent example of how the exemplary Van Ruisdael depicted the interior of an untamed forest. Straight white accents indicate reflections in the pond in the middle foreground. This pond is also the nucleus of the picture and its only flat surface. On the right two stems of dead trees have fallen into the pond and rest in an oblique position. On the left only the trunk of another tree is still standing, with the mossy terrain behind it uneven and becoming hilly in the background. It is overgrown with wild brushwood from which giant trees rise high up, their unruly crowns silhouetted against the gloomy sky.
As in all first rate Ruisdaels of this period, palpable details are suggested with supreme mastery, as here for instance, the fractures in the twigs to the right and the withered reed leaves to the left of the pond. They are dots of orange brown, lighting up in the darkest area of the picture. The wild wood is dark and inhospitable, yet there is an escape. In the centre of the composition the rays of a late afternoon sun enter through an opening between the trees. Here a mild light caresses twigs and leaves and opens up a wide view into free space. It is here that we find the only inhabitants of this desolate place, for we see a man with a stick over his shoulder walking out of the forest into the open, with a dog following him. In this superb painting Van Ruisdael manages to capture a remarkable passage of landscape whilst hinting at the vagaries of life.
Dr Albert Blankert, University of Utrecht, Holland.
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