Who is Jacob van Ruisdael?

Jacob Isaackszoon van Ruisdael (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈjaːkɔp fɑn ˈrœyzdaːl] (listen); c. 1629 – 10 March 1682) was a Dutch painter, draughtsman, and etcher. He is generally considered the pre-eminent landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, a mature of great wealth and cultural talent when Dutch painting became extremely popular.

Prolific and versatile, Van Ruisdael depicted a wide variety of landscape subjects. From 1646 he painted Dutch countryside scenes of remarkable character for a youth man. After a trip to Germany in 1650, his landscapes took on a more valorous character. In his late work, conducted bearing in mind he lived and worked in Amsterdam, he extra city panoramas and seascapes to his regular repertoire. In these, the appearance often took taking place two-thirds of the canvas. In sum he produced more than 150 Scandinavian views featuring waterfalls.

Van Ruisdael’s forlorn registered pupil was Meindert Hobbema, one of several artists who painted figures in his landscapes. Hobbema’s do its stuff has at period been confused with Van Ruisdael’s. There is profundity in attributing Van Ruisdael’s work, which has not been helped by the fact that three members of his relatives were afterward landscape painters, some of whom spelled their name “Ruysdael”: his father Isaack van Ruisdael, his renowned uncle Salomon van Ruysdael, and his cousin, confusingly called Jacob van Ruysdael.

Van Ruisdael’s be in was in request in the Dutch Republic during his lifetime. Today it is loan across private and institutional collections on the order of the world; the National Gallery in London, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg hold the largest collections. Van Ruisdael shaped landscape painting traditions worldwide, from the English Romantics to the Barbizon learned in France, and the Hudson River School in the US, and influenced generations of Dutch landscape artists.