Jacob van Ruisdael and the Romantic Impulse

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

When you enter the Ruisdael exhibition at the Art Museum, the first image that confronts you is "View of Egmond aan Zee with a Blasted Elm." Painted in 1648, it's a relatively early work and one whose title tells all. You stand there absolutely riveted by the artist's almost photographically exact rendering of a blasted elm tree.

Poor Egmond aan Zee pales to insignificance. The tree— painted in warm brown tones that stand out among the predominant hues of blue, green and gray— takes up the entire left portion of the painting and extends about three-quarters of the way up the canvas. The blunt gray steeple of the town church tries to challenge the tree for perpendicular dominance, but it doesn't even come close--this despite the fact that the steeple is more nearly located at the center of the painting. The tree even prevents the painting from becoming a typical Dutch "big sky" landscape. In the end, the painting seems to be more about the tree than the town, and this in turn causes the viewer to ponder the exact meaning of the piece. Why does a "dead” tree take up so much space? For those who consult the excellent exhibit catalogue, a further complication presents itself. Ruisdael painted at least two versions of the painting-- one is at the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow-- and the variant painting has no tree at all!

At another point in the exhibit, which is organized along thematic rather than strictly chronological lines, we are confronted with a group of paintings of Bentheim Castle, executed over a four-year period from 1651 to 1655. (The catalogue text informs us that Ruisdael painted more than a dozen versions of the castle during his lifetime.) He tries depicting the castle from various angles and at various elevations. One painting is more scenic, with the castle surrounded by verdant landscape. Another is more nearly "a document" (in the Atget sense of the word) and shows us precisely what the castle looks like. Finally the painter hits upon his "money shot," the Dublin version of the painting in which the castle is seen dominating a hilltop, and the trees— which fairly hide the buildings from view in the first version— now seem flattened into the hillside.

What I find in both of these instances is a romantic rather than a classical mind at work. The classical painter would be satisfied with a painting that analyzes the landscape and reproduces it in a schematic way. The romantic must take the landscape as he finds it, filter it through his own sensibilities, and then re-interpret it. Ruisdael's landscapes are re-interpretations of what his eyes see-- and brilliant ones at that.

Ruisdael was a great lover of nature-- can a really fine landscape painter be anything else? He never misses a chance to celebrate nature in his art. But nature has many aspects to it. Some painters --Turner, Van Gogh, Munch--are able to apprehend nature at a mystical level, while others, like Ruisdael, fasten upon its more scenic qualities. Ruisdael reminds me of our own Hudson River School in that both see nature as fundamentally benevolent, and both stand in awe of nature's fecundity.

Indeed, one of Ruisdael's recurrent motifs is the tangle of trees. I think the painter loves this image not only because it can provide an incredibly picturesque background for a work, but because it expresses the amplitude of nature-- and nature’s willfulness. Can a Dutch painter, raised in a land subject to the constant danger of flooding, help but feel otherwise?

Ruisdael offers beautifully rendered paintings of sluices, moats, windmills--all the various implements by which man hopes to tame nature and turn it toward his ends. He takes us out to sea in a series of marine paintings in which vessels are tiny toys driven and tossed by wind and wave. Interestingly enough, I found the smallest of these marine paintings to be the most powerful. Ruisdael was as fond of huge canvases as any other painter of his time, but his vision doesn't really need them to come through.

(Further evidence of that can be seen in the Art Museum gallery devoted to his drawings and etchings. Here you will see tiny black-and-white renderings of his trademarked tangle of trees that are no less compelling than their larger painted brethren.)

Ruisdael painted during the Baroque period, and if we must view him as a purely Baroque artist, rather than as a Romantic who transcends his time and place, then the best place to begin is with his paintings of ruins. "Landscape with the Ruins of Egmond Castle at Egmond aan den Hoef" (yes, the Egmond of Beethoven fame) is a splendidly theatrical work. The castle itself was the scene of a great battle during the Dutch struggle for independence from Spain, and its single blasted tower thrusting up defiantly at the very center of the painting makes a splendid statement concerning the need to be free and the cost of freedom. The theatricality of the piece is what makes it work.

Another painting with a similar theme, "A Ruined Entrance Gate at Brederode Castle," doesn't work nearly as well. It's quite picturesque, but it lacks the theatrical quality of the single ruined tower. It works more as a melancholy evocation of times gone by.

I should add at this point that this is not necessarily the way that Ruisdael saw these ruins. He apparently viewed them as positive images of the steps needed to build a great nation. In a similar way, he saw the blasted elm that I mentioned earlier not as an image of death but as a depiction of life's struggle to assert itself. He was careful to depict the elm as still putting forth a few tenacious leaves, therefore not "dead."