3 Consistent with seventeenth-century Doesburg is that we see, from left to right, the city’s windmill on a wall of rammed earth, the drawbridge over the town’s moat, the square tower would be one of the city’s entrance gates; the Veerpoort, and the Grote or Martini Church. The tiny tower between gate and the church may be the tower of the town hall. No other views on Doesburg by Ruisdael are known as yet.
Ruisdael’s winter scenes struck a chord with artists and connoisseurs in the Romantic era, and later. The well-known critic Dr. Gustav Waagen in 1835 saw one in the collection of Sir Robert Peel (presently Philadelphia Museum of Art, inv. 1917, 569) and remarked: ‘The feeling of Winter is here expressed with more truth than I have ever seen’.4 In our painting Ruisdael made the cold palpable as well.
The first recorded owner of our painting was the famous Russian geographer and statistician Pyotr Petrovich Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky, who passionately collected Dutch and Flemish
painting during his travels through Europe. At the end of his life his collection contained more than 700 paintings. A large part of his collection is still kept in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.
Jacob van Ruisdael’s year of birth is deduced from a document of 1661, in which he stated his age as 32. His father, Isaack van Ruisdael, was a painter, a frame maker and a picture dealer. Undoubtedly, Jacob studied with him and possibly also with his uncle, Salomon van Ruysdael. His earliest landscapes and drawings are dated 1646. During his first years of productivity he also made some etchings. In 1648, Jacob joined the Guild of St. Luke in his native town Haarlem. Around 1650 he travelled with his friend Claes Berchem to the area along the Dutch- German border. In 1656 or slightly later Ruisdael moved to Amsterdam, where he received citizenship in 1659. He remained in Amsterdam for the rest of his life and died a bachelor. Meindert Hobbema is Ruisdael’s only documented pupil, but his influence extended to a large group of contemporary landscape painters, among them Guillaume Dubois, Cornelis Decker, Roelof van Vries, Salomon Rombouts and Jan van Kessel.
Notes
1 See for this Slive, op. cit. (under literature), nrs. 662-694, pp. 469-489.
2 The artist’s uncle Salomon van Ruysdael was born in Naarden, and especially in his early career Ruisdael devoted some drawings and paintings to it, among them a panoramic view (Madrid, Museo Thyssen).
3 We would like to thank Laurens Schoemaker, the topography specialist of the Dutch Institute of Art History in The Hague for his kind help. Schoemaker consulted several experts specialized in the historical town of Doesburg and its environs. These are Rinus Rabeling, chairman of the local museum ‘De Rode Toren’ in Doesburg, who in his turn consulted J.W. van Petersen, former town archivist of Doesburg, and Nina Herweijer (former director of the Historisch Museum Deventer), and they all judge Doesburg possible.
4 G.F. Waagen, Works of Art and Artists in England, 3 vols., London 1838, vol. 2, p. 21.