Introduction

Summary

Jacob Ruisdael (1628/29–82), more than any other Dutch painter of his time, shows a complex response to the environment. That he was able to do so was made possible by what George Kubler has called a “good entrance”; the son, nephew, and cousin of artists, he was born in, and as a young man grew up in, Haarlem, a center of landscape painting and a city whose environs were noted for their beauty. Moreover, he subsequently lived and was active in Amsterdam at the peak of Dutch prosperity. Ruisdael was painting in the Dutch Republic at a time when Dutch reclamation projects, agricultural improvements, technological innovations, and even the liquidity of landed property were the envy of their European neighbors. Since Ruisdael's paintings are rooted in that context, this study also reaffirms this place and period as foundational, in Western Europe and beyond, for later attitudes towards landscape as property and investment as well as a place for retreat and recreation. That Ruisdael, who painted at a time when understanding nature was often linked to its control and improvement, constructed scenes which provide an alternative vision acknowledging and, at times, privileging uncultivated even waste land suggests that he and those who appreciated his pictures had a complex attitude toward the environment. At the very least, that vision of landscape which included the worked, waste, and wild, was a reminder of a balance easily lost in the world beyond his paintings. Consequently, Ruisdael's complex response to those achievements and attitudes in paintings that were popular with his contemporaries is of considerable importance for our understanding a key transitional period for landscape—in paintings and in the lived environment.

No doubt pride in the land and an assumption that it provided evidence of God's providence shaped the attitudes towards landscape of both the artist and those who bought his works, but it is the precondition of Ruisdael's response to the lived landscape that is my subject.3 My focus is on the way his sensitive and accurate representations portray diverse living forms within complex environments that minimize but do not preclude the human presence. It is a type of depiction that Ruisdael achieved with considerable attention to the world around him and much labor to render it with such nuance. In this attention to the complexities of particular environments he presents a viewpoint that we would today characterize as ecological.