Thoughts that lie too deep for paint
Christopher Brown
JACOB VAN RUISDAEL by John Walford Yale, f40, pp.256 In Les Maitres d'Autrefois, his almost uncannily perceptive account of 17th- century Dutch painting, published in 1877, Eugene Fromentin declared of the great landscape artist Jacob van Ruisdael, 'There is in the painter a man who thinks and in each of his works a conception.' Many of Ruisdael's landscapes contain accurate topographical elements but these are very consciously and carefully composed with an eye to pictorial effect. And yet is it only pictorial effect which Ruisdael is striving for — or is this thinking painter trying to communicate religious and philosophical ideas in his landscapes? In a painting like the 'Jewish Cemetery' — the burial place at Ouderkerk just outside the city limits of Amsterdam, which is still an intensely mov- ing place to visit — there can be little doubt that Ruisdael intended to provoke the spectator to meditate on mortality. Constable, a great admirer of the artist, recognised the painting's ambition but dis-
liked it for attempting 'that which is out of the reach of the art'. A painting like the `Pool surrounded by Trees' in the National Gallery seems to exude a melancholy which recalls Tennyson's: 'The woods decay/ The woods decay and fall. . . ' This sense of sad- ness was detected in Ruisdael's works by Goethe, Fromentin and other critics influ- enced by the views of his first biographer, Houbraken, who remarked that the painter 'did not have luck as his friend'. In such scenes, portraying the decay and renewal of nature, did Ruisdael see intimations of human mortality?
These are the questions which lie at the heart of John Walford's fascinating and thoughtful study of Ruisdael. He approach- es them from a clearly acknowledged standpoint: he is himself a committed Christian and was a pupil of Professor Hans Rookmaker of the Free (which is to say, Calvinist) University of Amsterdam, who devised a sophisticated theory of Christian aesthetics. It is not, therefore, surprising to find that Walford believes many of Ruisdael's landscapes contain pro- found religious symbolism. He argues his case with skill and care, giving due consid- eration to the views of those who believe that formal, pictorial considerations out- weigh religious or moral ones. He makes extensive use of contemporary Dutch liter- ature in his examination of the motivation of landscape painters and of Ruisdael in particular — although, perhaps inevitably, he places great or even undue emphasis on Pietistic authors like Jan Luyken or Jodocus van Lodensteyn. His even-handed conclusion is that:
his [Ruisdael's] landscapes are not merely dra- matic renderings of the local scene nor are they just a series of encoded symbolic messages
'Wooded Country Road', by Jacob van Ruisdael, 1652
embodied in landscape, but rather he pre- sents us with images of great range and vari- ety which at the same time express a unified underlying vision of reality.
The question of the meaning of Dutch landscape paintings — or indeed of many other types of Dutch painting — has been a live issue among art historians in recent years. Having read all the arguments, I am reluctant to believe that religious symbol- ism — the broken cartwheel interpreted as a momento mori, the castle on a hill as the New Jerusalem — is as important in the construction of Ruisdael's landscapes as Walford believes it to be; never before, however, has this argument been set out with such clarity, learning and verve. I won- der whether it really is possible to go beyond such very general notions of sym- bolism as Constantijn Huygens' view of
Nature as God's second book in which `The Lord's goodness is manifest on the top of every dune ..
Although this debate is — as it properly should be — at the heart of Walford's book, it also contains a thorough study of Ruisdael's biography (in which he comes down on the side of those who believe that he is the surgeon recorded in Amsterdam c 1676) as well as extended considerations of the themes of his art — waterfalls, watermills, forests and swamps, views of Haarlem (`Haarlempjes'), etc — and its stylistic development. As we have come to expect from Yale, it is well laid out with clear black-and-white and excellent colour plates.
Christopher Brown is Chief Curator at the National Gallery.
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