Jacob Ruisdael (1628/29–82), more than any other Dutch painter of his time, shows a complex response to the environment. That he was able to do so was made possible by what George Kubler has called a “good entrance”; the son, nephew, and cousin of artists, he was born in, and as a young man grew up in, Haarlem, a center of landscape painting and a city whose environs were noted for their beauty. Moreover, he subsequently lived and was active in Amsterdam at the peak of Dutch prosperity. Ruisdael was painting in the Dutch Republic at a time when Dutch reclamation projects, agricultural improvements, technological innovations, and even the liquidity of landed property were the envy of their European neighbors. Since Ruisdael's paintings are rooted in that context, this study also reaffirms this place and period as foundational, in Western Europe and beyond, for later attitudes towards landscape as property and investment as well as a place for retreat and recreation. That Ruisdael, who painted at a time when understanding nature was often linked to its control and improvement, constructed scenes which provide an alternative vision acknowledging and, at times, privileging uncultivated even waste land suggests that he and those who appreciated his pictures had a complex attitude toward the environment. At the very least, that vision of landscape which included the worked, waste, and wild, was a reminder of a balance easily lost in the world beyond his paintings. Consequently, Ruisdael's complex response to those achievements and attitudes in paintings that were popular with his contemporaries is of considerable importance for our understanding a key transitional period for landscape—in paintings and in the lived environment.

No doubt pride in the land and an assumption that it provided evidence of God's providence shaped the attitudes towards landscape of both the artist and those who bought his works, but it is the precondition of Ruisdael's response to the lived landscape that is my subject.3 My focus is on the way his sensitive and accurate representations portray diverse living forms within complex environments that minimize but do not preclude the human presence. It is a type of depiction that Ruisdael achieved with considerable attention to the world around him and much labor to render it with such nuance. In this attention to the complexities of particular environments he presents a viewpoint that we would today characterize as ecological.

Things Fall Apart: Broken Bridges

Ruisdael's ruins, like his depictions of dunes and grainfields, provide an oblique view of the human presence within nature. Though on occasion his works include the sorts of monumental sites and picturesque structures that appear in pictures by other artists, unlike them he always subordinates the works of man within the natural environment. Nonetheless, traces of human existence in these landscapes are a reminder that people as well as non-human nature are part of a wider ecology of time as well as place. Two examples from the 1646 Dresden sketchbook, the Farmstead with the Ruins of Brederode (figure 50) and the High Stone Footbridge (figure 51), treat ruins both as subsumed in a wider landscape and as incidental to everyday life.1 In Ruisdael's drawing, Brederode, surrounded by the out-buildings of a farm, is sketched in lightly. The dilapidated castle provides a background to two workmen who concentrate on the activity at hand; the grindstone in the foreground is given more definition than the monument. Likewise, in the drawing of the High

Stone Footbridge, the bridge is placed aslant and though somewhat derelict is clearly still in use. In both drawings the black chalk is handled with delicacy, each entity—sky, brush, trees, water, and the man-made structure—is distinguished by tone and texture but (with the slight exception of the workmen) no one element stands out. Both drawings introduce motifs—a derelict bridge and sluices as well as a ruinous monument—that continue as important motifs in Ruisdael's work. They also exhibit his somewhat idiosyncratic approach marked by indirection and contextualization.

Woodlands

Woodlands are Jacob van Ruisdael's most consistent subject; they appear with considerable variation from his earliest to his latest paintings. Throughout these works, woods and marshes are shown as entangled environments where wasteland dominates and the human presence is minimal. These pictures exemplify Ruisdael's labor to render trees, brush, and plant life in all their vitality. They are also rooted in his observation of particular places and reveal him as having traveled to seek out different types of landscape. At the same time, though, these pictures show Ruisdael looking to and engaging with the artistic tradition in shaping his subject matter and his technique. In short, Ruisdael's woodlands and woodland marshes exemplify his positioning himself as a mediator between nature and culture. In working through this interface these pictures achieve “pictorial truth and artistic honesty” where the meaning and subject matter, fact and fiction, the familiar and the “foreign” merge. Generative nature is even more evident in these woodland and woodland marsh pictures than in the paintings with dunes, grainfields, ruins, and flowing water discussed earlier. Moreover, Ruisdael's woodland and woodland marsh paintings realize the vitality of organic form by means of considerable artifice.

Already in 1646, the year Ruisdael first signed and dated his paintings, his woodland pictures show attention to the peculiarities of wooded places and individual trees. Despite their similar subject of a track into a wood, Road in an Oak Forest, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (figure 103) and Light in the Forest, Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Vienna (figure 104) are very different.

As this study aims to show, Ruisdael's preoccupation with dunes, grainfields, rushing water, ruins, and woodlands continues throughout his career but with shifts in point of view and focus. A distanced view is most evident in the later paintings. For example, the closely observed details of soil and plant life in the early dune landscapes give way to later overviews of Haarlem or its environs seen from the dunes. The grainfields increasingly become a small part of a larger whole, the wooded landscapes either part of park landscapes or a far prospect. Inviting pathways generally give way to an overarching perspective. For the most part the later works depict distant views, extensive skies, low horizons, and wide-ranging vistas. Nonetheless, the new subjects of the later years, like Ruisdael's earlier ones, reveal his ongoing preoccupation with process, temporality, motion, and generation. The Haarlempjes show his continued concern with the dunes and their transformation, the winter landscapes with wind and weather, the beach scenes with the ebb and flow of water, the Amsterdam views with construction and destruction. Moreover, the low horizon and dominant sky in the late works give greater scope to Ruisdael's longstanding interest in effects of light, wind, and weather. The clouds and illumination of the skyscapes evoke these phenomena but also provide illumination of the environment below the horizon that corresponds with the type and arrangement of the clouds, an effect which explains their apparent accuracy but also reveals their artful construction. The seeming ephemerality of light plays off the more sustained transformation of the dune landscape; the scale of human constructions is viewed in relation to the wider world. In short, Ruisdael's late works still assert humanity's humble place within mutable and organic nature. The wide sky and elevated foregrounds provide an expansive panorama that emphasizes the minuteness of human activity and their embeddedness in nature.

With its depth of space, high sky, and diffuse light, Ruisdael's small painting, Winter Landscape near Haarlem with a Lamppost, Frankfurt, Stadelmuseum (figure 123) is characteristic of his late works. But it is also consistent with his overall oeuvre in its emphasis on the artist's observation of such specific natural details as the look of snow mixed with mud, as well as the way it delicately outlines bark, branches, twigs, and grasses.

Dune Landscapes and Pleasant Places

It is appropriate that landschop, the likely etymological source for the word landscape and subsequently landscape painting, originally referred to shoveled land thrown up against the sea to produce viable agrarian land at sea level along what is now the Dutch coastline. It is even more appropriate that the city of Haarlem and its environs are central to making landscape in both cases. Historically, Haarlem and its surroundings (figure 5) were distinguished by a terrain made up of dunes and peat; the elevated sandy areas were suitable for building, and eventually, with considerable labor, much of the marshy areas were drained for grazing and arable use. This history is documented in maps, surveys, and legal records. Both sand and peat were in themselves valuable resources and were treated as such in real estate transactions and in their extensive sale and removal, a practice which dated from as early as the fourteenth century and became more prevalent with the increased land speculation of the seventeenth. The long-vanished peatlands rarely appear in pictures, but the protective dunes which feature from the earliest descriptions of the city still exist now, even if reduced. Indeed, dunes have consistently figured among the pleasant places around Haarlem whose beauties, history, and productivity were celebrated in poems and descriptions, and were among the earliest native landscapes depicted by Dutch artists. The Haarlem dunes were also well represented in maps, surveys, and topographical views which documented property rights and land use. These latter supplement literary and historical sources and underscore the selective choices of artists for landscape pictures.

Water Mills and Mill Runs

While not waste in the conventional sense, Ruisdael's interest in depicting water shows the same interplay of elements that are or are not under human control, as in his treatment of dune landscapes and grainfields, which combine the arable and wild. The pictures of water mills and waterfalls reveal his experience of a more rugged terrain east of the Ijssel River. This hilly and varied landscape is characterized by more diverse types of waterflow in brooks, rivers, and mill runs than he would have seen in Holland. His pictures of coastal waters, though, date from his early years in Haarlem. In any case, water is ubiquitous in Ruisdael's work. Coastlines, rivers, or marshy pools figure in most of his paintings, even when they are subordinate to other motifs. But only in his watermills, marine, and waterfall paintings does water dominate. It plays a significant role in only two works from the 1640s, a drawing, Seascape with Sailboats, from the Dresden sketchbook (1646) and a small panel (dated 164[9]) depicting a woodland landscape with a small active stream that has a single carefully observed and rendered drop. In other early works, Stone Bridge with a Sluice (Rijksmuseum Twenthe; figure 52) and Bridge with a Sluice (the Getty), Ruisdael shows more interest in the working of sluices than in water flow. This interest in the labor needed to control water continues as in his Men Building a Dam, Wooded Landscape with a Sluice Gate, and Landscape with a Rear View of a Watermill with a Punt, all from the 1660s.

Technē: Labor and Landscape

Jacob Ruisdael's landscapes of dunes and country roads reveal his consistent effort to find a technique for rendering pictorially the details of nature he observed so closely. His paintings of grainfields and edge lands, which also figure among his earliest works, show an even greater preoccupation with finding a way of matching his mark making with the morphology of natural forms. Not only do open grainfields present the pictorial problem of portraying a massive form made up of individual stalks, but the boundaries between fertile land, waste, and pathways juxtapose varied and complex environments. Ruisdael's choice of motifs and treatment of this land and its boundaries exemplify human craft and labor, including his own, within a landscape. His experimentation with etchings in which he explores the vital forms of botanical life in these borderlands especially reveals this interplay of mind and hand, that is with maker's knowledge or technē. Ruisdael's concerns with making, labor, and the evident role of transformation in his artistry and subject matter would have resonated with his many contemporaries who had a vested interest in this sort of countryside.

The term technē as used here describes the process by which Ruisdael labored to embody what he saw (the domain of “knowledge”) by means of his craft (practice). Technē so understood considers the work of art as including the labor and explorations required to achieve the best possible solution. In Ruisdael's case that would be the ability to convey the environmental character of a place as well as to capture the structure, morphology, and even something of the sprightliness of natural forms.

In a small oval gallery at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the beautifully lit vitrines draw the immediate attention of many of its visitors. As a consequence, they might fail to notice the gallery's ornate painted ceiling, which was designed in 1725 by Claude III Audran (1658–1734) and preserved from an eighteenth-century Paris mansion, the Hôtel de Verrue (Plate 1). A gilded frieze of singerie, playful monkey figures dressed and imitating human behavior, set against a blue background borders an interior field of arabesque designs. The ease with which the identification of this ceiling can be overlooked typifies the underappreciation of Audran's oeuvre despite a career spanning nearly forty years, from the 1690s until his death.

During this period, Claude III Audran played a critical, yet largely overlooked, role in the development of Rococo design to suit the elite tastes of the period. He created a new kind of ornamentation that updated the grotesque, a form of ancient Roman painted ornament featuring fantastic animals and decorative elements that was rediscovered in the Italian Renaissance. His designs tapped into topical motifs instead of the propagandistic themes of absolutism conveyed in design from Louis XIV's early decades. French decorative style changed from the severity of the Baroque to the light, whimsical aesthetic of the Rococo, and Audran's work in its entirety reflects this evolution of elite taste. Audran achieved artistic and enduring professional success due to his creation of arabesque ornament, which blended venerable motifs with those drawn from popular culture into a sort of generic hybridization.