Biography

(both: yä´k p vän rois´däl) (KEY) , c.1628–1682, Dutch painter and etcher, the most celebrated of the Dutch landscape painters. He studied with his father Isack and, later, with his uncle Salomon van Ruysdael, a well-known Haarlem landscapist. He first worked in Haarlem and moved to Amsterdam in 1656. Late in life, he obtained a medical degree and practiced as a physician in Amsterdam. Ruisdael’s characteristic work shows northern nature in a somber mood. His skies are usually overcast, throwing a restless flux of light over the countryside. Gnarled, knotted oak and beech trees are rendered with extraordinary accuracy. Ruisdael’s later works show great breadth of stroke, dramatizing humanity’s insignificance amid the splendor of nature. Important later paintings include Jewish Cemetery (Detroit Inst. of Art) and Wheatfields (Metropolitan Mus.). He also produced some very fine etchings. Ruisdael anticipated and inspired many of the great French and English landscapists of the next two centuries. Of his pupils, Meindert Hobbema was the most outstanding. The Rijks Museum, the National Gallery, London, and many American collections have examples of his work.
See W. Stechow, Dutch Landscape Painting of the Seventeenth Century (1968).

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