(Haarlem circa 1628/29–1682 Amsterdam)
A river landscape with a windmill, a town in the distance,
signed with a monogram lower right: JVR (ligated),
oil on canvas, 60 x 70 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Germany

We are grateful to Frits Duparc who has confirmed the attribution to Jacob Isaacsz. van Ruisdael after examination of the present painting in the original, dating the work to the 1650s.

The present picture is an important addition to the early oeuvre of van Ruisdael. From the artist’s 700 or so recorded paintings, relatively few of his works portray windmills, which are typically set, as here, within a carefully conceived landscape inspired by the countryside around Haarlem. All are dated to before the artist’s move to Amsterdam towards the end of the 1650s, where his style matured, seeing him now heralded as the pre-eminent landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age.

Hitherto unpublished, Duparc compares the present work with Landscape with Windmills near Haarlem which is conserved in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, circa 1650-52 (inv. no. DPG 168). Relative to the Dulwich picture, the starker tonality of the present windmill’s sails against a clouded sky is echoed in Landscape with a Windmill by a River, circa 1655 (private collection, illustrated in the RKD database under no. 50246). The genesis of both compositions can be traced to an important drawing conserved in the Kunsthalle, Bremen, (inv. no. 5 Z), related by Duparc to the present picture.

Duparc suggests a similar date of execution to the three afore-mentioned works, and notes that although the Grote Kerk in the distance characteristically appears inspired by Haarlem’s St Bavo, the composition is of van Ruisdael’s own invention and does not represent a real structure or landscape setting. This follows van Ruisdael’s practice of drawing from nature in the countryside and then re-working elements together in his studio. The meticulously precise draughtsmanship of the artist is evident here, while the thick impasto lends depth and character to the foliage. Van Ruisdael’s windmills, with their turret-like dominance of the picture space, also appear imbued with some of the dramatic sense of monumentality that he sought out in his contemporaneous depictions of Bentheim castle. The present composition is in fact a daylight scene, but due to the artist’s choice of pigments, which have darkened somewhat the greens of the hitherto verdant landscape and soft-hued clouds have become more subdued, lending the work a unique, twilight air.

Van Ruisdael’s earliest works date from 1646 and exhibit his knowledge of the works of Cornelis Vroom, another Haarlem landscape painter. Two years later van Ruisdael became a master of the Guild of St. Luke in Haarlem. From 1650 to 1653 he travelled extensively in the Netherlands and the Rhineland. He is recorded in Amsterdam in the annals of the reformed Calvinist Church from 1657, and was made a burgher of the city in 1659. There he collaborated with other artists for the staffage in his compositions, notably Adriaen van de Velde, Philips Wouwerman and Nicolaes Berchem. Meindert Hobbema was his most famous pupil. Van Ruisdael also produced several delicately finished etchings, notably The Wheat Field, conserved in the Petit Palais, Paris.