IV - Water: Matter in Motion

Summary

Abstract

“Water: Matter in Motion” considers Ruisdael's depictions of flowing water in mills and mill streams, marine paintings, and waterfalls. The pictorial problem posed by these subjects is of painting water, especially water flowing or pounding against a surface. He was famous in his own day for his ability to deal with this difficulty. This chapter investigates the pictorial means by which he succeeded. It also considers the problem of analyzing and picturing flowing motion as one that preoccupied experimental philosophers and mechanics and what Ruisdael's approach shares with theirs. His works exemplify his labor and imagination in the close observation of specific effects, as well as his attention to the traditions of painting to achieve the varied effects of flowing water.

Keywords: matter in motion, watermills and mill runs, marine painting, waterfalls

Water Mills and Mill Runs

While not waste in the conventional sense, Ruisdael's interest in depicting water shows the same interplay of elements that are or are not under human control, as in his treatment of dune landscapes and grainfields, which combine the arable and wild. The pictures of water mills and waterfalls reveal his experience of a more rugged terrain east of the Ijssel River. This hilly and varied landscape is characterized by more diverse types of waterflow in brooks, rivers, and mill runs than he would have seen in Holland. His pictures of coastal waters, though, date from his early years in Haarlem. In any case, water is ubiquitous in Ruisdael's work. Coastlines, rivers, or marshy pools figure in most of his paintings, even when they are subordinate to other motifs. But only in his watermills, marine, and waterfall paintings does water dominate. It plays a significant role in only two works from the 1640s, a drawing, Seascape with Sailboats, from the Dresden sketchbook (1646) and a small panel (dated 164[9]) depicting a woodland landscape with a small active stream that has a single carefully observed and rendered drop. In other early works, Stone Bridge with a Sluice (Rijksmuseum Twenthe; figure 52) and Bridge with a Sluice (the Getty), Ruisdael shows more interest in the working of sluices than in water flow. This interest in the labor needed to control water continues as in his Men Building a Dam, Wooded Landscape with a Sluice Gate, and Landscape with a Rear View of a Watermill with a Punt, all from the 1660s.