V - Woodlands and Marshes: Art and Nature

Summary

Abstract

“Woodlands and Woodland Marshes: Art and Nature” considers works which embody Ruisdael's pictures of wildwood in various stages of growth and decay in or near marshland from the mid-1650s. This chapter explores the role of his innovative etching technique in developing a pictorial means to convey the vital forms of generative nature. The requisite ability to differentiate the structures, states, and textures of living things, referred to in the history of science as a probing gaze, is especially applicable to Ruisdael the etcher. The mediation of the artist, so explicit in the etchings, is also an important aspect of these paintings, in which the way water mirrors trees and sky exemplifies the relationship between the observation and construction of landscape.

Keywords: art and nature, generative nature, mountains, etching, schilderachtig

Woodlands

Woodlands are Jacob van Ruisdael's most consistent subject; they appear with considerable variation from his earliest to his latest paintings. Throughout these works, woods and marshes are shown as entangled environments where wasteland dominates and the human presence is minimal. These pictures exemplify Ruisdael's labor to render trees, brush, and plant life in all their vitality. They are also rooted in his observation of particular places and reveal him as having traveled to seek out different types of landscape. At the same time, though, these pictures show Ruisdael looking to and engaging with the artistic tradition in shaping his subject matter and his technique. In short, Ruisdael's woodlands and woodland marshes exemplify his positioning himself as a mediator between nature and culture. In working through this interface these pictures achieve “pictorial truth and artistic honesty” where the meaning and subject matter, fact and fiction, the familiar and the “foreign” merge. Generative nature is even more evident in these woodland and woodland marsh pictures than in the paintings with dunes, grainfields, ruins, and flowing water discussed earlier. Moreover, Ruisdael's woodland and woodland marsh paintings realize the vitality of organic form by means of considerable artifice.

Already in 1646, the year Ruisdael first signed and dated his paintings, his woodland pictures show attention to the peculiarities of wooded places and individual trees. Despite their similar subject of a track into a wood, Road in an Oak Forest, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (figure 103) and Light in the Forest, Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Vienna (figure 104) are very different.