Exhibited
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1922
Boston, Harvard University, Fogg Museum of Art, 1928
London; Ontario, University of Western Ontario, McIntosh Memorial Gallery, Loan Exhibition. Seventeenth Century Dutch Masters, (cat. by B.M. Green) 1954
Providence, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design; Tampa, The Tampa Museum;
Norfolk, The Chrysler Museum, The Discovery of the Everyday. Seventeenth Century Dutch Paintings from the Wolf Collection, 1982-83, nr. 43 (‘Landscape with Cattle and a Church’)
Alkmaar, Stedelijk Museum, Ruysdael en Saenredam. Meesterwerken van de Grote Kerk, (cat.
by Chr. Klinkert) 2018
Literature
‘Dutch Masters Shown at Fogg’, Art News, 12 May 1928, p. 6
W. Stechow, Salomon van Ruysdael, Berlin 1938, p. 132, nr. 535
W. Stechow, Salomon van Ruysdael, Berlin 1975, p. 152, nr. 535
Description
This summery river scene shows Salomon van Ruysdael at his best. Estuaries and rivers were his favourite theme. Here the water expanse takes up the entire foreground, giving the beholder the sensation of standing in a boat. As often the case, Ruysdael put a clump of dense trees at one side of the composition, allowing the other side to open up to a wide panoramic view. Two cows stand nearby in the shallow water, one of them keeping a watchful eye on us. Further down the river a vessel cuts through the water as it is blown forth by strong wind. Near the horizon the tiny silhouettes of more shipping and two ferries can be made out.
Majestically rising up above the rooftops is Alkmaar’s Grote Kerk. It is not often that Ruysdael depicted topographical sites.1 With Alkmaar, however, the artist developed a close connection. When in 1644 Ruysdael’s brother the merchant Pieter de Gooyer died, the artist received custody over his three daughters.2 The city was a short trip to the north of Haarlem, where Ruysdael lived, and from then on he will have visited Alkmaar more frequently. It was exactly in this later period of his career that the artist would paint a series of at least fourteen views of Alkmaar with dates ranging from 1644 to 1667. Many of them employ roughly the same compositional layout as our painting, with a diagonally receding river as the main motif. Our work is particularly close to a version dated 1660.3 Many of Ruysdael’s Alkmaar views are in public collections.4
The Stedelijk Museum in Alkmaar very recently acquired an early example of 1644.5 Just as in that painting, Ruysdael here shows the town as seen from the north. This doesn’t mean that Ruysdael’s representation is entirely realistic. The Stedelijk Museum’s version is the only in the series that is to a high degree topographically accurate. For instance, in our painting the river itself is artistic licence.6 Detailed accuracy was not Ruysdael’s prime concern. Yet some elements were clearly inspired by the real situation, such as the standard mill ‘De Munnik’ (The Monk), which was located on the northern corner of the town’s rampart.7 Left from the mill we see a roof with a chimney or small tower rising up. This could be the still existing building of the Oude Doelen. The isolated building on the extreme right is the Geesterpoort of Bergerpoort. The spire right from the Grote Kerk probably is the chapel of ‘The Oude Hof’.8 The latter two buildings can be seen in many of Ruysdael’s other views as well.
Ruysdael painted this vedute with deft strokes of the brush that bespeak the confidence of decades of experience. A similar boldness can be seen in the solidly structured composition, throwing in sharp relief the shadowed volumes of the treetops and skyline against the backdrop of the bright sky. The massive cloud formations, painted with broad strokes, are beautifully counterbalanced with the trees on the bank on the left stretching up and leaning out over the water. With its hyper-realistic rendition of the cloudy sky, this painting is nothing less than an ode to the Dutch landscape.
