Jacob van Ruisdael Paintings

Jacob van Ruisdael Paintings for Sale >>

Oil Painting Supplies of 350 Famous Painters * Oil Painting Supplies of 150 Styles

Knowledge: Oil Painting * Acrylic Painting * Watercolor Painting * Gouache Painting * Asian Ink Art
Pastel Painting * Charcoal Drawing * Pencil Sketch * Wax Crayon Painting

Toperfect supply oil painting masterpiece reproductions of the old master Jacob van Ruisdael, you are welcome to send us your own Jacob van Ruisdael pictures to copy.

The copyright of scripts in this website is owned by Toperfect. Toperfect reserves the manual scripts of original version. Toperfect will take appropriate legal action in the piracy and infringements of copyright.

Biography of Jacob van Ruisdael

Netherlands Baroque artist
born 1628 - died 1692
Master of: Meindert Hobbema (1638-1709).
Influence on: Constant Troyon (1810-1865).
Dutch Golden Age.
Baroque artist, often considered the greatest Dutch landscape painter. Jacob van Ruisdael was probably the pupil of his father, the frame maker and artist Isaak de Goyer, who later called himself Ruysdael.

None of Ruisdael paintings have been identified with certainty, and it is impossible to determine the nature and extent of his influence on Ruisdael. The Dutch Golden Age landscape painter was the nephew of the noted painter Salomon van Ruysdael(this distinction in spelling occurs consistently in their own signatures).
The influence of Cornelis Vroom, another Haarlem landscapist, is often noticeable in his early paintings of the 1640s. The earliest dated van Ruisdael paintings are of 1646. Two years later the painter became a member of the Guild of St Luke in Haarlem. From 1650 to 1653 he traveled extensively in the Netherlands and the neighbouring parts of western Germany. Jacob Ruisdael travelled to the Dutch/German border with his friend Nicolaes Berchem in the early 1650s, and one of the landscape paintings that resulted was the celebrated Bentheim Castle (1653, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), in which the castle heroically crowns the top of a steep, rugged hill, transformed by his imagination from the mild slope it is in actuality.

The early Ruisdael painting, such as the Landscape with a House in the Grove (c. 1646; The Hermitage, St. Petersburg), reflects his obsession with trees. Earlier Dutch artists use trees merely as decorative compositional devices, but Jacob van Ruisdael makes them the subject of his paintings and imbues them with forceful personalities. His draftsmanship is meticulously precise and is enriched by thick impasto, which adds depth and character to the foliage and trunks of his trees. After 1650 the monumentality of his landscapes increases.

In his view of Bentheim Castle the forms become more massive, the colors more vibrant, and the composition more concentrated. The latter quality is even more evident in his famous Jewish Cemetery (1655-60; Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), which is one of his most masterly compositions. All motifs of secondary importance serve as accessories to the main motif, three ruined tombs. The Ruisdael painting symbolizes the transience of temporal things.
After 1656 compositions became more spacious and his palette became brighter. His paintings of Jacob van Ruisdael landscape with waterfall and his Marsh in the Woods (c. 1665; Hermitage, St. Petersburg), recall his earlier interest in forest scenes. But more often late works, names such as Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede (c. 1665; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), Jacob van Ruisdael Wheatfields (c. 1670; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and his numerous views of Haarlem display panoramas of the flat Dutch countryside.

The horizon is invariably low and distant and dominated by a vast, clouded sky. Sometimes the small figures in Jacob van Ruisdael paintings were added by other artists, such as Adriaen van de Velde, Johannes Lingelbach, Philips Wouwerman, and Claes Berchem. van Ruisdael also produced several delicately finished etchings, one of the most famous of which is The Cornfield (Petit-Palais, Paris).
His influence was resounding, both on his Dutch contemporaries and on artists in other countries in the following two centuries — Gainsborough, Constable, and the Barbizon School for example. Examples of Jacob van Ruisdael painting are in many public collections, the finest representation being in the National Gallery, London.