Page:Hofstede de Groot catalogue raisonné, Volume 4, 1912.djvu/18

 4 JACOB VAN RUISDAEL SECT. as rarely as he painted the change from day to night. His foliage is always fully grown. It has either the fresh tone of early summer, or the dark hues, already mingled lightly with brown and yellow, of summer at the full an effect heightened by the darkening of the pigment in the course of centuries. The breadth of tone at which Jan van Goyen and Salomon van Ruysdael in his early period had aimed was for Ruisdael an outworn convention. Everything in his work tends to bring out strongly the local colour. A sunlit sandhill and a red brick wall are favourite incidents in many of his pictures, as well as the glittering white stems of beeches and firs and birches which stand in a spot that attracts the eye, or have been felled and lie on the ground. Many pictures, representing places which may still be recognised such as Haarlem, the Dam at Amsterdam, and Wijk bij Duurstede enable one to prove Ruisdael's truth to nature in his landscape. But other pictures, such as that of the Jewish burying-ground at Ouderkerk on the Amstel transferred into a rocky landscape (219), prove his imaginative power. In truth, Ruisdael's art consists of that combination of truth to nature and of imagination which has made him the greatest landscape-painter of Holland, and has caused his pictures to rank, at all times, among the most admired treasures of this art. In his youth Ruisdael etched a few plates. The subjects are the same as those of his early pictures, and are rendered in the same careful and laboured manner. His drawings, usually in crayon, are simple studies for his painted com- positions, with which they coincide in treatment. The landscape-painters of the eighteenth century have much on their conscience in respect of the drawings which, even in the most famous collections of our time, pass under the name of Ruisdael. A. Blooteling engraved on copper some elaborate drawings which Ruisdael made to illustrate the growth of Amsterdam about the year 1660. Reference has been made to the painters who adorned Ruisdael's land- scapes with figures. Ruisdael himself painted landscape backgrounds for a few portraits by Van der Heist, and for some pictures of game and poultry by Jacomo Victors and Johannes Vonck. PUPILS AND IMITATORS OF JACOB VAN RUISDAEL Ruisdael's kinsmen were either his artistic forerunners or his con- temporaries. As they all had the same family name, their signatures have been mistaken for his, or have been fraudulently altered into his by chang- ing or removing the initial letter of the Christian name. This caused great confusion, which was only cleared up during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The kinsmen who claim attention were Jacob van Ruisdael's father Isack, his uncle Salomon, and his cousin Jacob, Salomon's son. ISACK VAN RUISDAEL flourished at the beginning of the seventeenth century. As has been said above, he was first regarded as a painter, and