VP4589

SALOMON VAN RUYSDAEL (Naarden 1600/03 – 1670 )

A River Landscape with a Ferry Boat and a distant View of Deventer

On panel, 21½ x 33¼ ins. (54.6 x 84.5 cm)

PROVENANCE Sir Charles Edward Coleridge Cave, 4th Bt. (1927-1997), Sidbury Manor, Sidmouth By whom sold, Sotheby’s, London, 22 February 1956, lot 68, for £4,000 to Owen

LITERATURE W. Stechow, Salomon van Ruysdael, Berlin, 1975, p. 131, no. 401B

NARRATIVE Salomon van Ruysdael was one of the greatest and most prolific of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painters. Unlike many artists of his generation, he never travelled abroad, but lived his whole life in Haarlem. During his career, he produced views of the dunes near his hometown, landscapes with villages, scenes of travellers halting by a wayside inn, marines, winter landscapes and even a few still lifes, but the subject he treated more often than any other and with which he is most intimately associated, is the river landscape. Indeed, scenes of rivers and estuaries, with ferry boats and other vessels, preoccupied him almost continually throughout his long career. Yet it is a measure of his inventiveness that they always seem to present a fresh and convincingly realistic image of an actual place.

Ruysdael first addressed the theme of the river landscape in 1631. His River Landscape of that year in the National Gallery, Londoni, already employs the basic elements of design that make use of the diagonal of a riverbank to create an impression of recession, a simple and effective scheme that he subsequently varied and refined throughout his career. During the course of the 1630s, together with several other Haarlem artists, most notably Jan van Goyen, he perfected the atmospheric effects and restrained palette that characterise the ‘tonal’ landscape style. In the following decade, Ruysdael’s art continued to evolve as he moved away from his most monochrome experiments. In the later 1640s and 1650s, his compositions become more monumental, with a greater emphasis on structure: the clumps of trees on the riverbank grow more stately and the architectural motifs more substantial. At the same time, he adopts a wider range of colour, sharper contrasts of light and dark and a thicker application of paint.

This beautifully balanced painting is a classic example of Ruysdael’s mature river scenes. A overcrowded ferry, bearing travellers and locals with their livestock, glides across a broad expanse of water in this tranquil scene. On the right, a stand of tall trees grows on the riverbank, their trunks stretching up and out over the placid water. The diagonal created by the receding bank leads the eye effortlessly towards the horizon, where sky and water merge imperceptibly in a luminous glow. On the far bank, a couple of rowing boats hug the shoreline and further downstream several sailing vessels are silhouetted against the sky. Visible in the distance is the distinctive profile of the double-spired Berg Kerk in Deventer, which identifies the body of water as the River Ijssel.

Unlike Jan van Goyen, who left numerous sketchbooks documenting his peregrinations in the Dutch Republic, no sketches or drawing by Salomon have survived. However, his paintings, which depict among other places, , , , Deventer, Dordrecht, Egmond, , Haarlem, Naarden, Rhenen, Scheveningen, Spaamdam, , Valckenburgh, Weesp, Zantvoort and even Brussels, suggest that he, too, travelled widely in The . Nevertheless, topographical accuracy seems rarely to have been his primary concern and he regularly took artistic liberties in his representations of actual places.

Deventer stands on the east bank of the River Ijssel in the south of the province of Overijssel. The present view is therefore be taken from the south-east and the smaller church situated to the left of the big church and close to the water must be the Grote Kerk (or Sint- Lebuïnuskerk), although its tower has been somewhat modified. Ruysdael painted several other views of Deventer: a view taken from the south-east, dated 1645, is in the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdamii and a view from the north-west is in the National Gallery, Londoniii.

Although the present painting bears no date, it can be dated with some certainty to the years around 1649-1650 owing to its similarities to dated examples from those years. In terms of its composition and general conception, colouring and ferry motif, it can be closely compared with the larger River Landscape with a Ferry of 1649, in the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection, and a painting of the same subject, dated 1650, in the Mr. and Mrs. Edward William Carter Collection, in Los Angeles. Also comparable, though the composition is reversed, is the large River Landscape with a Ferryboat of 1649, in the National Gallery of Art, in Washington.

Salomon Jacobsz. van Ruysdael was born in Naarden around 1600, the son of a cabinet maker from Gooiland, Jacob Jansz. de Goyer. Early in his life, Salomon used his father’s name but later he and his brother Isaack adopted the name Ruysdael, probably derived from the country manor, Ruisschendael near , their father’s home town. Despite the difference in spelling, it is the same family as the artist’s famous nephew, . Shortly after their father’s death in 1616, Salomon and Isaack, who was also a painter, frame maker and art dealer, moved to Haarlem. Salomon entered the city’s St. Luke’s Guild in 1623 and lived there for the rest of his life. His earliest known landscape is dated 1626 and he was praised as a landscape painter as early as 1628 by Samuel van Ampzingiv. In 1647 and 1669 he served as an officer of the St. Luke’s Guild and, in 1648, was made dean. In 1651, Ruysdael was recorded as a merchant dealing in blue dye for Haarlem’s bleacheries. Although he lived most of his life in Haarlem, he appears to have travelled widely in The Netherlands and his paintings include views of Dordrecht, Utrecht, Arnhem, Alkmaar and Rhenen. He was buried in St. Bavo’s Church in Haarlem in 1670.

P.M.

i Salomon van Ruysdael, River Landscape, signed and dated 1631, panel, 36.6 x 65.5 cm, London, National Gallery, Inv. No. 1439. ii Salomon van Ruysdael, River Landscape with a View of Deventer, signed and dated 1645, on canvas, 110 x 151.5 cm, inv. no. SK-A-3259 (check this is from North-west). iii Salomon van Ruysdael, A View of Deventer seen from the North-west, on panel, 51.8 x 76.5 cm, National Gallery, London, inv. no. 6338. iv Samuel Ampzing, Beschrijving ende lof der stad Haerlem in Holland, Haarlem, 1628.