Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael

Lady Elisabeth Pringle, London, 1877;
With Galerie Charles Sedelmeyer, Paris, 1898;
Mrs. P. C. Handford, Chicago;
Her sale, New York, American Art Association, 30 January 1902, lot 59;
William B. Leeds, New York;
His sale, London, Sotheby’s, 30 June 1965, lot 25;
L. Greenwell;
Anonymous sale ('The Property of a Private Collector'), New York, Sotheby’s, 7 June 1984, lot 76, for $517,000;
Gerald and Linda Guterman, New York;
Their sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 14 January 1988, lot 32;
Anonymous sale New York, Sotheby’s, 2 June 1989, lot 16, for $297,000;
With Verner Amell, London 1991;
Acquired from the above by Hans P. Wertitsch, Vienna;
Thence by family descent.

London, Royal Academy, Winter Exhibition, 1877, no. 25;
New York, Minkskoff Cultural Centre, The Golden Ambience: Dutch Landscape Painting in the 17^th Century, 1985, no. 10;
Hamburg, Kunsthalle, Jacob van Ruisdael – Die Revolution der Landschaft, 18 January – 1 April 2002, and Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum, 27 April – 29 July 2002, no. 31;
Vienna, Akademie der Bildenden Künste, on loan since 2010.

C. Sedelmeyer, Catalogue of 300 paintings, Paris 1898, pp. 1967–68, no. 175, reproduced;
C. Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné..., London 1912, vol. IV, pp. 204–06, nos 645 and 652;
J. Rosenberg, Jacob van Ruisdael, Berlin 1928, p. 98, no. 412;
K.E. Simon, Jacob van Ruisdael, Berlin, 1930, p. 75;
W. Liedtke, in The Golden Ambience: Dutch Landscape Painting in the 17th Century, exhibition catalogue, New York 1985, no. 10, reproduced, as 'one of van Ruisdael's most ambitious and successful early works';
S. Slive, Jacob van Rusidael: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, Drawings and Etchings, New Haven and London, 2001, p. 355,  no. 481;
M. Sitt, in Jacob van Ruisdael – Die Revolution der Landschaft, exhibition catalogue, Hamburg and Haarlem, 2002, p. 110, no. 31.

 

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's: Jacob Isaacksz. Van Ruisdael. Hilly Wooded Landscape with a Falconer and a Horseman. Signed with a Monogram JvR. This painting has a strong old stretcher, and still firm old lining, with a comparatively recent restoration. The romantic Italianate hilly landscape itself is in extremely good condition, with the foliage and vegetation virtually throughout remarkably intact, including the fallen tree trunk in the foreground with every detail of the bark and wayside grasses. Even the most fragile foliage against the sky has been preserved. The sky has had various strengthening retouches scattered across the surface, apparently to bring out the bluer tones. Elsewhere there have been just a very few small touches within the most notable places in the image: accentuating with warm light touches the passage of the path up the hill, and the line of the tree trunk behind the well, strengthening the dark jacket of the figure mounting the hill and the asses neck near the water pump, as well as giving a few touches to the figures in the foreground, with a minor touch or two in the lower right foreground. In some respects the splendid dark foliage has naturally slightly sunk over time, but the overall condition of this great landscape is excellent. This report was not done in laboratory conditions.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

This is one of the largest and most ambitious works from Ruisdael's early maturity in the early to mid-1650s. The schema of the landscape, with a large hill on one side of the composition with a more distant vista suggested on the other, is similar to the compositional ideas that Ruisdael had evolved in his celebrated paintings of Bentheim Castle, painted at much the same time. A good example is the view of the castle from the northwest formerly at Kingston Hall and now in a private collection.¹ In pictures such as this, Ruisdael clearly demonstrates his bold new interest in mass and contrast in works in which he tended to introduce landscape forms of a grander and more monumental character. The steep, almost exaggerated hill in this painting is typical of this tendency, its forms highly detailed and realistic but still enhanced for effect, and the details of trees and vegetation thickly painted with the brush. At its summit the sun breaks through and illuminates the half-hidden features of a house beneath the branches of the trees. A similar heavily wooded hill can be found in another work of this period, the Stone Quarry in the Kunsthaus in Zürich.

Although it is difficult to suggest a more precise dating for this picture, a clue is afforded by the figures and animals that populate the canvas. As both Slive and Sitt observe, these are attributable to Ruisdael's frequent collaborator, Johannes Lingelbach (1722–1674). Lingelbach had earlier been in Rome, but had left the city in 1650. This picture must therefore date from after his return to Amsterdam, which seems to have been in 1653. The figure of the man who walks with his two greyhounds behind the falconer, holding a frame for carrying hooded birds of prey and their kills, is found in various guises in several of his independent landscapes.³ Very similar staffage by Lingelbach, as well as many of the compositional traits in this canvas, may also be found, for example, in another view of Bentheim Castle and cottages of around 1655, today in the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum, in Kofu, Japan.⁴

Ruisdael was undoubtedly the greatest landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age. He entered the Guild of St Luke in Haarlem in 1648, whose members between 1645 and 1655 included several of the best Dutch landscape painters from whom he learnt his trade, among them Salomon van Ruysdael, Pieter Molijn, Cornelis Vroom and, after his return in 1645 from Sweden, Allaert van Everdingen. Ruisdael was undoubtedly responsible for the new direction of Dutch landscape painting after circa 1650, away from the 'tonal' phase exemplified by his uncle Salomon van Ruysdael and by Jan van Goyen to one characterized by a strong colour range and overtly naturalistic compositions. His versatility meant he experimented with every type of landscape painting; his extant oeuvre consists of over 700 paintings of raging torrents, broad distant panoramas of the Dutch flatlands, wide cityscapes, open seascapes and dune-scapes.

1 Slive 2001, p. 40, no. 26, reproduced.

2 Ibid., p. 356, no. 484.

3 See, for example, the Landscape with a hawking party sold in these Rooms, 7 December 2007, lot 161 or that sold London, Christie's 28 April 2006, lot 41.

4 Slive 2001, p. 34, no. 18.