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Landscape as Ecosystem in Jacob van Ruisdael’s Wheat Fields Colin Hemez Yale University, Department of the History of Art (B.A. ’18) [email protected] PREPRINT – DO NOT COPY Hemez 2 Landscape as Ecosystem in Jacob van Ruisdael’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 Haarlem 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 Karel van Mander’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 painting 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-1620s (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 landscape painting 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 PREPRINT – DO NOT COPY Hemez 3 What seems clear is that the grain fields in van Ruisdael’s paintings, 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 Amsterdam 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 PREPRINT – DO NOT COPY Hemez 4 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 1600s, and he was likely well-acquainted with the painter and poet 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 Adriaen van de Velde and Johannes Lingelbach 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. PREPRINT – DO NOT COPY 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.