Jacob van Ruisdael: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, Drawings and Etchings - Book Review

Seymour Slive Yale University Pres novel Haven and London, 2001, ISBN 0 300 08972 4 150 [pound sterling]

Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/29-82) is rightly regarded as the greatest landscape painter of the heroic age of Dutch art. Not single was he prolific, producing more than eight hundr landscapes, on the contrary also exceptionally varied. When Wolfgang Stechow compiled his invaluable overlook Dutch Landscape Painting of the Seventeenth hundred (1966), he divided the field into thirteen thematic categories; Ruisdael was the alone artist to contribute to all on the contrary one of them, namely Italianate landscapes. Ruisdael was the pre-eminent practitioner of the 'classical phase' of naturalistic Dutch landscape, producing everything from intimate exhibitions of the dunes around his native Haarlem, to majestic woodlands, expansive panoramas, grain fields, soaring mountains and thunderous waterfalls, quiet beaches and tempestuous seascapes, cityscapes and winter pageants A bold artist, he also took risks by dint of painting unprecedented subjects, such as mountains literally soaring from one side clouds (the paintings in Cape Town and St Petersburg) or the panorama of Amsterdam from the unfinished cupola of the fresh Town Hall. Ruisdael's oeuvre has at last received the monumental and comprehensive inquiry it deserves; Seymour Slive's of the first grade lavishly illustrated, and weighty (a daunting 788 pages!) fresh book is the product of more than thirty years of research, and presents for the first time a catalogue of all the master's paintings, drawings and rare etchings.

While Professor Slive's catalogue of the great Ruisdael exhibition held at the Mauritshuis and the Fogg in 1982 was available and a monograph upon the painter was written by dint of E. John Walford in 1991 until the appearance of the near book the basic catalogue raisonne remained Jakob Rosenberg's 1928 monograph, which (printed in an edition of solitary 360 copies) was virtually unobtainable. Like Stechow's contemplate the new catalogue divides the paintings into fourteen thematic categories and has separate sections for the more than single hundred and thirty drawings, and thirteen etchings. To this are added a chronology of Ruisdael's life, a chronological list of the dated works, entirely illustrated sections devoted to doubtful paintings and drawings, and extensive concordances, indexes, and bibliography. While each thematic cluster is prefaced by a revealing discussion of Ruisdael's approach and contributions to the control this is not an introductory monograph upon the artist's life and work (though our indefatigable author promises single 'in due course'), but rather a scholarly catalogue describing all the works and distinguishing the autograph oeuvre from misattributions.

still it is not just for the connoisseur and specialist. There is a great deal of fascinating novel information about the specific sites Ruisdael addressed, the liberties he took with his naturalistic looking settings, his arboreal and botanical powers of observation, and the master's tastes and practices. We have drawn out marvelled, for example, at Ruisdael's inventiveness in painting compelling northern waterfalls without at any time having made a trip to Scandinavia, on the other hand it is not until his many cataracts and rushing streams are entirely arrayed before you (numbering nearly single hundred and seventy pictures!) that individual fully appreciates the fact that this was the largest single category of his work, and better understands the observation of Arnold Houbraken and other seventeenth-century authors that the artist's name, Ruisdaei ('geruis-dalen' means noisy valleys in Dutch) strike one as beinged to be a play upon his favourite subject. Other fresh facts emerge. We had lengthy known that Ruisdael probably travelled around 1650 in the company of his comrade Haarlem landscapist and collaborator, Nicholas Berchem, to Westphalia and Bentheim Castle, which appears in the one and the other artists' works. However, it had also been assumed that they were drawn to Burgsteinfurt near Bentheim because Berchem's father, the still-life painter, Pieter Claesz, was reflection to have been born there. Now Slive reports that Irene van Thiel-Stroman has discovered that Claesz was in fact born in Berchem, near Antwerp. He further watchs that Bentheim was famous for providing the limestone that was used to build Amsterdam's grander buildings, including the Town Hall that Ruisdael watched and recorded being erected on the Dam where he had an apartment. The idea that his incomparably grand painting of 1653 of Bentheim Castle (formerly in the Beit Collection, and now in the National Gallery of Ireland) was painted not for the enumerate of Bentheim, as legend relates, on the other hand instead/or one of the merchant families who imported the stone remains a tantalising possibility.

The pleasure of the entries resides in the detailed discussions of famous pictures that we assumed we knew similar as the Mill at Wijk (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), where the subtly crossing wave foreheads in the water in the foreground were noted through an expert oceanographer--'the kind of a detail normally caught through hydrologists, not artists'--or the fact that the mill itself, according to an aeronautical engineer and historian of windmills, correctly displays the staves of the sails in a functional position, forward toward their leading cutting sides Neither natural nor man-made details escaped Ruisdael. Here too is learned discourse upon the bleaching fields that feature prominently in his panoramas of Haarlem and valuable of recent origin facts, such as a concern to a haerlempje which--according to Pieter Biesboer--was recorded in an inventory as of 1663 largely six years earlier than another document usually cited in dating this undated cluster There also are thought-provoking observations that dare ready explanation: why, for example, did the one and the other Ruisdael and Rembrandt draw the Montelbaanstoren without its spire? While allowing that the famous Jewish burying-ground (versions in both Detroit and Dresden) undoubtedly alludes symbolically to the transience of life, Slive wisely takes a sceptical view of attempts that have been made to interpret large portions of Ruisdael's art as pictorial sermons