Although he has long been regarded as the greatest landscape painter of seventeenth-century Holland, very little is known about Jacob van Ruisdael. He was born in Haarlem in 1628 or 1629. His father, Isaack, was a maker of ebony frames, an occasional art dealer and a part-time painter who spent much of his life – on the evidence of various legal proceedings taken against him, most involving money – in grinding poverty. It was probably Isaack who gave the young Jacob his first lessons in painting, although it seems likely that the boy was also taught by his uncle Salomon, one of the leading landscape painters of the Haarlem school.
 
By the age of eighteen, he had surpassed his teachers and set himself up as an independent artist. He lived to be just over fifty, dying in Amsterdam in 1682, and he appears to have spent most of that time painting pictures. More than 800 landscape paintings are securely attributed to his hand, but the historical record remains stubbornly mute when it comes to his personality. He never married. There is no contemporary description of him, no known portrait and nothing is known of his beliefs, other than that in the summer of 1657 he requested baptism into the Calvinist Reformed Church.
 
“Jacob van Ruisdael”, an enthralling exhibition of more than a hundred oil paintings, etchings and drawings, suggests that the void of historical knowledge concerning the artist may, at least in part, have been of his own making. Ruisdael’s genius seems inseparable from his habits of self-effacement. He immersed himself in the world that surrounded him, studying the works of man and nature with a slow, steady and boundlessly humane evenness of attention.
 
No other artist of his time painted the Dutch landscape in so many...

To read the full article please either login or register .