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Home , Jacob van Ruisdael, Karel van Mander

Landscape as Ecosystem in Jacob Ruisdael’s

Colin Hemez Yale University, Department of the History of Art (B.A. ’18) [email protected]

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Landscape as Ecosystem in ’s Wheat Fields

To map a landscape is to understand a world, but to paint a landscape is to make one. Over the course of his 35-year career, the Dutch landscapist Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/29-1682) frequently walked the line between these two renditions of landscape. Known early in his career for his incredibly true-to-life depictions of trees and shrubs, van Ruisdael eventually turned to more heroic renditions of the Dutch countryside, as exemplified by his Haarlempjes (“Little Pictures”) of the 1660s and 1670s. While the Haarlempjes exemplify van Ruisdael’s conception of the landscape as a kind of map, his Wheat Fields (c. 1670, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), painted around the same time as his Haarlem views, conceives of the landscape as an ecosystem (Figure 1). A close look into the theories that informed van Ruisdael’s artistic training—particularly ’s writings on landscape and his understanding of the term schilderachtig—clarifies van Ruisdael’s formulation of the painted landscape as an integrated environment. Wheat Fields presents a view of much more than its name suggests—the title, unlikely to have been van Ruisdael’s original, categorizes the as one of some twenty-seven works showing grain fields that van Ruisdael painted over the course of his career.1 The title is also misleading: Nothing about the fields of grain identifies them as wheat, which is true of all of van Ruisdael’s “grain field pictures”.2 Given the artist’s peerless reputation for painting nature (and especially vegetation) with exquisite detail, his choice not to disclose the species of grain is significant. 3 The “grain field picture” genre, moderately popular among landscapists and draughtsmen like Claes Jansz. Visscher and Pieter Santvoort in the early seventeenth century, lost its appeal after the mid- (Figure 2).4 Nonetheless, van Ruisdael seems to have revived the genre twenty years later, when he painted his first canvas of the type in 1647. Why grain fields lost their popularity, why they may have been popular in the first place, and why van Ruisdael chose to return to the motif are unsolved mysteries, but grain fields represent a curious choice of subject for in a nation that imported the vast majority of its grain.5

1 Liedtke 2007, pp. 786 2 Slive 2001, pp. 111. 3 Ashton et al. 1982, pp. 5. 4 Walford 1991, pp. 149. 5 Schama 1987, pp. 78

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What seems clear is that the grain fields in van Ruisdael’s , regardless of what motivated him to paint them, act as foils for interrogating something else about his scene. What else is in the scene? Wheat Fields looks upon a rural Netherlandish landscape shortly after a thunderstorm appears to have passed.6 The most impressive feature of the painting is not the expanse of grain fields flanking the edges of the composition, but is instead the strongly foreshortened road in between them. The road acts as the visual point of entry for the scene, and leads the eye immediately into the deep pictorial space of the painting. At the end of the road lies the entrance to a village, veiled by the forest surrounding it and shadowed by storm clouds floating above. Sunlight shines on a small hill overlooking a placid body of water, to the left of the village. Atop the hill, barely discernible in front of the grey clouds extending above the horizon, stands a wooden sailing beacon (Figure 3). The water below is likely that of the Zuider Zee (literally, “southern sea”), a shallow inland sea to the west of that van Ruisdael visited frequently.7 Four boats float in the Zuider, facing different directions as if to hesitantly explore newly calm waters. Awesome clouds, reaching unimaginable heights, dominate the sky in the upper two- thirds of the canvas; their forms elicit a destabilizing counterpoint to the compositional symmetry that van Ruisdael achieves on land with the foreshortened road. Either coming towards the grain fields or floating away from them—but certainly on the move—the clouds conceal a pale blue sky visible in the upper left-hand corner of the scene. van Ruisdael seems to have taken special care to render his clouds, tinting their highlights with a pinkish hue that stands in stark, almost jarring, contrast to the color of the sky. The clouds’ shadows, deepened with cool greys, hint at their ability to wreak havoc on the land and sea below them. They seem to have already done so: branches and logs scattered along the road suggest recent damage. An entire tree in the lower left-hand corner of the road has been completely decimated, if not by the storm then by a logger. Two deliciously sinuous saplings growing along a furrow to the right of the road seem battered. Despite the asymmetry in the cloud formations themselves, van Ruisdael’s shading of the clouds, with their darkest regions toward the left and right edges of the canvas, echoes the chromatic symmetry forced on the land by virtue of the central foreshortened road.

6 Despite its possible misnomer, I will continue using the painting’s title at the Metropolitan Museum for the sake of consistency. E. John Walford, it is worth noting, maintains that the grain in this painting is in fact corn. See Walford 1991, pp. 147. 7 The sea no longer exists, having been dredged to create reclaimed land for agriculture in the 20th century

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The population of Wheat Fields totals six: A mother and her young child walk on the road, towards the viewer, to greet a man in heavy boots clutching a black package under his arm. van Ruisdael deliberately omits the details of this encounter—who the man may be, his relationship to the villagers greeting him, and what he may be carrying are details left unarticulated. Before the orange walls that mark the entrance to the village, another man herds a flock of sheep. Two additional figures at the base of the hill on which the sailing beacon stands, superimposed on one another to almost appear as one, herd a second flock of sheep.8 van Ruisdael’s artistic training was heavily influenced by the conventions of painters in the early decades of the , and he was likely well-acquainted with the painter and Karel van Mander’s (1548-1606) writings. van Mander’s Den grondt der edel vry schilderconst (The Foundation of the Noble Free Art of Painting), published in the first edition of his Schilder-boeck of 1603/04, may have been of particular interest to van Ruisdael as it provided a rare Dutch perspective on the theory of landscape painting. In a section titled “Concerning Landscape,” van Mander implores aspiring landscapists to conceive of their scenes as fully integrated environments. He encourages artists to set up a dialogue between land and sky by painting portions of forests enshadowed by clouds above, or by including glints of sunlight reflecting off of ripples in water. “Think of the thickness of the air,” van Mander writes, noting that artists should consider air as a medium through which the components of their landscapes interact.9 van Ruisdael seems to have taken some of van Mander’s advice to heart; Wheat Feilds seems to be entirely about encounters and interactions. Whereas van Ruisdael employs a compositional symmetry to create a visual focus on the land, he uses a tonal symmetry to create a point of focus in the sky. The road places emphasis on the woman and child venturing out from the village, while the sky emphasizes the sunlit storm cloud directly above them. These dual modes of symmetry evoke an interaction between the central figures and the sky above them, setting off a visual oscillation between the two. Other interactions abound: The woman holding

8 These figures, and how they might affect the overall significance of the painting, will not be considered in this essay, partly because van Ruisdael—and Karel van Mander, in his writings on landscape painting—may have seen human figures as secondary embellishments to his landscapes. After moving to Amsterdam in 1656, van Ruisdael began collaborating with figure specialists such as and to paint figures into his landscapes. Such exchanges between artists deserve more consideration than I would be able to provide, and my primary concern is in van Ruisdael’s more personal conception of painting as an ecosystem. See van Mander 1604 (trans. 1985), pp. 54 and Slive 2001, pp. 111. 9 van Mander 1604 (trans. 1985), pp. 52.

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Hemez 5 her child’s hand and the man walking toward them suggest an exchange of words and gestures. The village in the woods conjures a protective exchange between civilization and natural world (the villagers will protect the forest because the forest protects the village), while the grain fields in the foreground imply a more exploitative dynamic between the same. Modulating regions of light and shadow allows van Ruisdael not only to highlight—literally—a few portions of the land he depicts, but also implies something about the position of the clouds above, outside the frame of the canvas. In addition to serving as a point of visual entry for Wheat Fields, the foreshortened road and the vegetation surrounding it gives van Ruisdael the opportunity to display what van Mander might have described as schilderachtig had he been alive to see it. While, in the nineteenth century, schilderachtig came to connote the painterly aspects of an artist’s work, the term had a different meaning for van Mander and the Dutch artists of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.10 Certainly, van Ruisdael’s looser brushwork on the road conforms to the modern sense of schilderachtig, and has been described as such.11 So does his signature in the lower right-hand corner of the road, which appears like track in the mud. But the artist’s understanding of the term, as Van Mander and his contemporaries used it, did not relate to the painterly qualities of the canvas, or to regions with visible brushstrokes or bold tonal contrasts.12 Rather, it related to an artist’s ability to render detail from life in a way that was pleasing to painters, evoking the visual self-sufficiency of the painting itself.13 Seventeenth-century schilderachtig refers to a closeness between a real-life object and its artistic representation. Not contingent upon painterly strategies that appear pleasing because of how they differ from the natural world, schilderachtig details are satisfying in their own right. Tellingly, van Mander most frequently uses schilderachtig to describe features of painted landscapes, and almost invariably to describe renditions of vegetation. In a typical example, he writes of a flower painted by Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem (1562-1638) as an apprentice; the flowers “were done in such a good and schilderachtig fashion” that his master

10 Bakker 1995, pp. 147. 11 Liedtke 2007, pp. 786. 12 Studies of van Mander’s published and unpublished writings have revealed that he used the term at least nine times, which is enough to begin to articulate the meaning of schilderachtig as he uses it. See Bakker 1995. 13 Bakker 1995, pp. 150.

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Hemez 6 decided to keep the picture for himself.14 The schilderachtig in van Ruisdael’s Wheat Fields, then, is not to be found in the loose brushwork of the road. Rather, it arises from van Ruisdael’s detailed depiction of tree leaves, mosses, and branches along the road in a way that foregrounds (both conceptually and compositionally) their relationship to other objects in the scene. The slender tree stump to the left of the man walking towards the woman and child, for instance: its jagged contours around the location at which the trunk has snapped are suggestive of shearing due to strong winds from a storm (Figure 4). This trunk tells a distinctly different story than does the wider trunk lying in the lower left of the road, whose clean cross-sectional cut suggests that it was sawed, not sheared by wind. In such passages, van Ruisdael conceives of landscape as an ecology, linking seemingly disparate elements of his composition (a tree trunk and a passing storm, for example) through the rendition of detail. van Ruisdael’s sensitivity to depicting interactions among natural phenomena is not limited to Wheat Fields. In a painting from 1646—by all accounts his first year as a professional painter—van Ruisdael displayed scrupulous attention to the unique characteristics of each tree species he included on the canvas (Figure 5).15 He rendered a pollarded willow and, behind it, an oak tree with such exquisite detail that they are immediately identifiable to a trained botanist.16 But he did not stop there. He also took care to paint specific types of vegetation at the bases of each tree that prefer to grow in soil near each tree species.17 Displaying more than an interest in the identity of the tree, its appearance, and its growth patterns, van Ruisdael sought to describe how the tree influences its local ecosystem.18 One other aspect of van Mander’s schilderachtig deserves attention: In a curious passage from his Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, he writes that Flemish draughtsman Jooris Hoefnagel’s (1542-1601) etchings of city views were rendered in a

14 van Mander 1604 (trans. 1994), pp. 284-85. 15 Nearly all trees that serve as a prominent subject in the foreground of van Ruisdael’s paintings are identifiable, lending weight to the notion that the unidentified grain fields in his grain field pictures are nothing more than foils. Had van Ruisdael wanted to make these the focus of his work, the rest of his oeuvre suggests that he would have made them easily recognizable. 16 Peter Ashton, tree expert at Harvard, contends that van Ruisdael was the first European artist to paint (as opposed to draw) trees and plants so accurately. See Ashton et al. 1982, pp. 5. 17 Slive 2005, pp. 4. 18 Another example of the artist’s careful attention to natural interactions: Seymour Slive notes that the water by the shore of van Ruisdael’s famous Mill at Wijk bij Duurstede (after 1668) features interfering wave patterns that suggest two wavefronts intersecting at an angle with one another. These patterns, in addition to being exceedingly short-lived and difficult to observe from life, would escape the notice of a casual observer, or even of most trained draughtsmen sketching studies for painted landscape scenes.

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Hemez 7 profoundly schilderachtig manner. 19 Not quite maps and not quite scenes drawn from life, Hoefnagel’s etchings nonetheless display an interest in elucidating the spatial relationships between the cities he depicts and their surroundings (Figure 6). van Mander’s description of the city views as schilderachtig attests to the intimate ties that mapmaking has with careful observation and detailed rendition. Around the time he painted Wheat Fields, van Ruisdael, too, was experimenting with the creation of hybrid cartographic landscapes. His views of Haarlem and the bleaching fields that surround the city—the Haarlempjes—describe a “mapped landscape,” writes in The Art of Describing.20 Central to the exercise of mapping in the Haarlempjes is van Ruisdael’s use of landmarks: Alpers notes that “In many mapped landscapes…, buildings, towns with their church towers, windmills, and clumps of trees appear as landmarks, literally marks on the land (as if a guide for travelers), rather than evocations of particular things.”21 Indeed, this is how the church spires in van Ruisdael’s View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds (1670-1675) appear to function, jutting above the horizon line (Figure 7). Normalized to the same vertical height on the canvas, the spires introduce the possibility of triangulating the location of the vantage point from which van Ruisdael mapped the scene.22 By contrast, the landmarks in Wheat Fields (to the extent that they exist—could the nearly-invisible beacon and the sinuous saplings count?) have a more equivocal relationship to one another. Compositionally, Wheat Fields owes more to View of Haarlem than it does to many of the other grain field pictures that van Ruisdael painted over the course of his career.23 Both feature a low horizon line that allots about two-thirds of the canvas to the sky, and both push tall compositional elements—trees, beacons, church spires—into the far distance. Carefully sculpted clouds, and van Ruisdael’s use of sunlight shining through clouds to illuminate certain regions of land, are also to be found in both paintings. But they display vastly different compositional schemes. In View of Haarlem, a conceptual understanding of the world at large serves as the primary organizational force in the composition. van Ruisdael devotes his fastidious awareness

19 van Mander 1604 (trans. 1994), pp. 309. 20 Alpers 1984, pp. 145. 21 Alpers 1984, pp. 142. 22 As if to reward viewers who engage in this exercise (and to confirm its legitimacy), van Ruisdael includes the figure of a draughtsman, presumably himself, in the right foreground of the painting, mapping the view before him. By including a figure in the act of mapping, van Ruisdael underscores the cerebral, synthetic, and imaginative nature of mapping the world. With no such figure in Wheat Fields, van Ruisdael evokes a more experiential aesthetic. 23 Slive 2005, pp. 12-3.

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Hemez 8 of his surroundings to mapping the landscape onto a canvas. For Wheat Fields, however, van Ruisdael takes a more phenomenological approach, in which careful observation for the sake of seeing and experiencing (and not for mapping and imaging) motivates his composition. Both paintings are fundamentally about relationships, interactions, and encounters. View of Haarlem prioritizes the spatial relationships between landmarks in order to map the scene in the world. Alpers notes that its subtly curved horizon works to “let the earth into” the picture, embedding a conceptual understanding about the world at large into the landscape. Haarlem and its bleaching fields, its economic activities and its church spires, are part of a world. Wheat Fields, however, privileges interactions between active and living matter in to describe natural processes. The tree trunk snapped by the wind of the storm, the village in the forest, the road and those who walk along it, are a world. van Ruisdael treats the painted landscape of Wheat Fields as its own ecosystem, a miniature and autonomous environment whose significance is derived from the detailed (schilderachtig) description of what he sees and not by the detailed description of how his vision relates to the broader world. Wheat Fields is an exercise in articulating what van Ruisdael experiences in the world—and not what he knows about it—onto canvas. The artist uses compositional and tonal strategies to describe interactions between the elements of his scene: Between woman and child, man, and the road that facilitates an encounter. Between land, sea, and the beacon that proudly delimits the boundary between them. Although the painting is compositionally similar to van Ruisdael’s Haarlempjes, his attention to detail in Wheat Fields— towards a schilderachtig rendition of vegetation rather than a schilderachtig rendition of landmarks—results in a scene that privileges self-sufficient naturalism over cartographic synthesis. As an ecosystem, Wheat Fields explores the canvas as its own miniature world.

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Bibliography Alpers, Svetlana. “The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art.” In The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, 119–68. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1984. Ashton, Peter, Alice Davies, and Seymour Slive. “Jacob van Ruisdael’s Trees.” Arnoldia 42, no. 1 (1982): 2–31. Bakker, Boudewijn. “Schilderachtig: Discussions of a Seventeenth-Century Term and Concept.” Simiolus: Quarterly for the History of Art 23, no. 2/3 (1995): 147–62. https://doi.org/10.2307/3780826. Bruyn, Josua. “Toward a Scriptural Reading of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape.” In Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, edited by Peter Sutton, 84–103. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1987. Eck, Xander van. “Jacob van Ruisdael. Hamburg and Haarlem.” The Burlington Magazine 144, no. 1192 (2002): 451–52. Leymarie, Jean. Dutch Painting. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1976. Liedtke, Walter. Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1st ed. Vol. II. III vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Mander, Karel van. The Foundation of the Noble Free Art of Painting. Translated by J Bloom, E Fraser, C Fresia, E Honig, E Jones, E Nicholson, C Thomas, and Elizabeth Honing. New Haven, 1985. ———. The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the First Edition of the Schilder Boeck (1603-1604). Translated by Hessel Miedema. 1st ed. Vol. I. IV vols. Doornspijk: Davaco Publishers, 1994. Schama, Simon. “Dutch Landscapes: Culture as Foreground.” In Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, edited by Peter Sutton, 65–83. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1987. Slive, Seymour. Jacob van Ruisdael: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, Drawings, and Etchings. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. ———. Jacob Van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape. , 2005. ———. Jacob van Ruisdael: Windmills and Water Mills. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011. Stone-Ferrier, Linda. “Views of Haarlem: A Reconsideration of Ruisdael and .” The Art Bulletin 67, no. 3 (1985): 417–36. https://doi.org/10.2307/3050960.

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Walford, E. John. Jacob van Ruisdael and the Perception of Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Weller, Dennis. Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Paintings. Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2009.

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Appendix: Figures

Figure 1: Jacob van Ruisdael, Wheat Fields (c. 1670). Oil on canvas, 100 x 130.2 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), bequest of , 1913.

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Figure 2: Pieter Dircksz Santvoort, Landscape with Road and Farmhouse (1625). Oil on oak, 30.2 x 37.5 cm.

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Figure 3: Detail of figure 1.

Figure 4: Detail of figure 1.

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Figure 5: Jacob van Ruisdael, Landscape with a Cottage and Trees (1646). Oil on panel, 71.8 x 101 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle.

Figure 6: Jooris Hoefnagel, View of Seville, from the series Civitaes Orbis Terrarum by Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg (1572- 1618). Etching.

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Figure 7: Jacob van Ruisdael, View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds (c. 1670-75). Oil on canvas, 62.2 x 55.2. Kunsthaus Zürich.

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