Conclusion

Summary

As this study aims to show, Ruisdael's preoccupation with dunes, grainfields, rushing water, ruins, and woodlands continues throughout his career but with shifts in point of view and focus. A distanced view is most evident in the later paintings. For example, the closely observed details of soil and plant life in the early dune landscapes give way to later overviews of Haarlem or its environs seen from the dunes. The grainfields increasingly become a small part of a larger whole, the wooded landscapes either part of park landscapes or a far prospect. Inviting pathways generally give way to an overarching perspective. For the most part the later works depict distant views, extensive skies, low horizons, and wide-ranging vistas. Nonetheless, the new subjects of the later years, like Ruisdael's earlier ones, reveal his ongoing preoccupation with process, temporality, motion, and generation. The Haarlempjes show his continued concern with the dunes and their transformation, the winter landscapes with wind and weather, the beach scenes with the ebb and flow of water, the Amsterdam views with construction and destruction. Moreover, the low horizon and dominant sky in the late works give greater scope to Ruisdael's longstanding interest in effects of light, wind, and weather. The clouds and illumination of the skyscapes evoke these phenomena but also provide illumination of the environment below the horizon that corresponds with the type and arrangement of the clouds, an effect which explains their apparent accuracy but also reveals their artful construction. The seeming ephemerality of light plays off the more sustained transformation of the dune landscape; the scale of human constructions is viewed in relation to the wider world. In short, Ruisdael's late works still assert humanity's humble place within mutable and organic nature. The wide sky and elevated foregrounds provide an expansive panorama that emphasizes the minuteness of human activity and their embeddedness in nature.

With its depth of space, high sky, and diffuse light, Ruisdael's small painting, Winter Landscape near Haarlem with a Lamppost, Frankfurt, Stadelmuseum (figure 123) is characteristic of his late works. But it is also consistent with his overall oeuvre in its emphasis on the artist's observation of such specific natural details as the look of snow mixed with mud, as well as the way it delicately outlines bark, branches, twigs, and grasses.