Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael

Private collection Russia, possibly Graf Gontovitch;
With Paul Cassirer, Berlin, by 1925;
Collection Otto B. Schuster, Amsterdam;
With Van Diemen, Amsterdam and Berlin, by 1930;
With P. de Boer, Amsterdam, by 1933;
Anonymous sale, London, Christie's, 14 May 1965, lot 125 (with incorrect provenance and literature);
With  Xaver Scheidwimmer, Munich, by 1972;
Private collection, Germany;
With Xaver Scheidwimmer, Munich, from whom bought by the present owner in 2005.

J. Rosenberg, Jacob van Ruisdael, Berlin 1928, p. 80, no. 125, reproduced plate CIV, no. 148;
S. Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael. A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, Drawings and Etchings, New Haven & London 2001, p. 158, no. 142, reproduced.

The following condition report has been provided by Sarah Walden, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting has a fairly recent lining and firm older stretcher. There has been some old creasing near the top of the canvas, with a three cornered tear at the centre of the top edge. A sequence of old creases run slantingly upwards from the right edge in the upper sky, now lined quite smoothly and retouched, with another series of short creases running inwards from the left edge of the sky and the vegetation just below, discreetly retouched. Apart from this accidental damage to the upper outer edges, the main body of the painting is beautifully preserved, including the magnificent cloudscape and water below, with the delicate central landscape finely intact generally, and just a few minimal retouchings in the rocks etc or at the edge. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

This rocky landscape in which a gently meandering river becomes a raging torrent as it falls over a steep ledge, is a wonderful example of Jacob van Ruisdael's supremacy in the genre and is particularly notable for the extraordinary skill in its depiction of fast moving water and the pyramidal construction of the landscape.  Such works were inspired by the paintings, drawings and engravings made by Allaert van Everdingen (1621-1675) during and after his journey to the south-eastern coast of Norway and western Sweden in 1644. It seems likely that Ruisdael saw these works as a young man when Everdingen returned to Haarlem in 1645 and they made an indelible mark on his output in years to come. However, Ruisdael's treatment of such scenes far exceeds those of Everdingen and, as Seymour Slive wrote of them:

'They impress through the variations he achieves by differing the height of the drop of the falls, the direction of the rushing water, the character of the boiling foam, the formation of the rocks and terrain, the variation of colour and the organisation of the powerful contrasts of light and dark areas'.¹

Despite his presumably early exposure to Everdingen's studies it was not until the 1650s that Ruisdael began to incorporate his stock of Scandinavian motifs into his own work and indeed the present work has been dated by Slive to the artist's late maturity. While the details of such works as this were probably not observed directly from nature, such is Ruisdael's skill that he reproduced them better than anyone else either before or after him.

Ruisdael was undoubtedly the greatest landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age. He entered the Guild of St Luke in Haarlem in 1648, whose members between 1645 and 1655 included several of the best Dutch landscape painters from whom he learnt his trade, among them Salomon van Ruysdael, Pieter Molijn, Cornelis Vroom and, after his return in 1645 from Sweden, Allaert van Everdingen. Ruisdael was undoubtedly responsible for the new direction of Dutch landscape painting after circa 1650, away from the 'tonal' phase exemplified by his uncle Salomon van Ruysdael and by Jan van Goyen to one characterized by a strong colour range and overtly naturalistic compositions. His versatility meant he experimented with every type of landscape painting; his extant oeuvre consists of over 700 paintings of raging torrents, broad distant panoramas of the Dutch flatlands, wide cityscapes, open seascapes and dune-scapes.

1.  S. Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael. Master of Landscape, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles 2005, p. 9.