Salomon van Ruysdael “River Landscape with Ferry” (1649)
Salomon van Ruysdael, River Landscape with Ferry (1649), Oil on canvas, Dimensions: 39 15/16 x 53 1/16 in.
Courtesy National Gallery of Art Washington
Salomon van Ruysdael (c. 1602 – 1670) was one of the great Dutch landscape painters of the seventeenth century. There were several painters in his family, including most famously, his nephew Jacob (c. 1629 -1692). This painting is one of his most important works.
Ruysdael presents the viewer with a scene that would have been commonplace at the time: carriages full of people moving down a road into the countryside, some cattle, and a ferry, packed nearly to overflowing with people and animals, making its way across the river. But the human elements of the landscape – the road, the buildings, the people, and the boats – occupy only a fraction of the painting’s surface. Except for the ferry and two figures at the lower left, all people and evidence of human civilization are relegated to the background. Nature dominates. The ravishing stand of trees along the river occupies the painting’s center (albeit slightly off the central vertical axis), drawing the viewer’s eyes immediately and repeatedly. But even the trees are overpowered by the vast expanse of sky and clouds. The sole figure to directly address the viewer is not a person at all but one of the small herd of insistently natural cattle at the lower left.
The painting’s large size (more than three feet tall and over four feet wide) commands attention and signals the importance of its subject. By the time Ruysdael was painting, European artists had already established a tradition of treating scenes from everyday life with the same importance as scenes from religion, history, and myth. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow (1565) is a well-known earlier example.
But the date of this painting has suggested to Arthur Wheelock a deeper meaning than might be immediately apparent from the subject matter. In 1648, the year before it was painted, the Peace of Westphalia ended both the Thirty Years’ War, which had brought decades of death and devastation to Europe, and the Eighty Years’ War, which had been fought (intermittently) since the sixteenth century to establish the Dutch Republic as a separate state independent of the Spanish Habsburg empire to which it had belonged. In 1649, when Ruysdael was painting this canvas, he was working in a Europe that was much more peaceful than it had been in decades and in a newly independent country experiencing great economic prosperity. Wheelock sees in this work not only a sense of peace and stability but also pride at the establishment of the Dutch Republic.
The formal elements of the painting, and particularly the way that Ruysdael uses forms, light, and color to construct the painting’s interior space also merit attention. The long, prominent riverbank stretches diagonally from left to right, with the vegetation, the architecture, and the people diminishing in size the further they appear along its length. This diagonal is mirrored, in a much smaller scale, by a group of three, nearly identical sailboats at the lower right, each one slightly smaller than the last. Ruysdael thus draws the viewer’s eyes along the riverbank and uses the diminution in the size of objects depicted to signal recession into space.
Light, too, progresses along the riverbank. At the left, a tall tree stands in shadow, marking its different position compared to the central stand of trees, which are mostly bathed in bright sunlight. The shadows in the central trees indicate a space farther in the background and farther along the diagonal riverbank. This alternation of light and dark further reinforces the sense of space Ruysdael was developing.
Ruysdael also uses color to reinforce the painting’s construction of space. Most of the scene is rendered in a restricted palette of blues, greens, and grays. Warmer tones, particularly reds and browns, are confined almost entirely to the foreground strip populated by the ferry, the cows, and the two figures at the lower left, all of which appear close to the viewer. Ruysdael deliberately extracts warmer tones in the farther reaches of the painting’s space. This is perhaps most notable in the tricolor flag of the Dutch Republic that is seen atop the mast of the largest sailboat. The red of the flag’s top stripe is barely present, quite different from the bright reds in the clothing on the figures in the foreground, and not so dissimilar from the blue sky behind it. The use of successive bands of brown, green, and blue (earth, plants, sky) to establish recession into space in landscape painting is part of a tradition dating back to the ancient Romans.
The painting itself has not always had a peaceful life. In the 1930s, it belonged to Jacques Goudstikker, who was one of the foremost dealers of Old Master paintings at the time. His gallery was in a grand, graceful building on the finest part of the Herengracht in Amsterdam. In May 1940, when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, Jacques and his wife, who were Jewish, fled with their young son, securing passage on one of the last ships to leave the Netherlands. Tragically, Jacques died in an accident at sea. His gallery was looted by Hermann Göring, and this painting, along with hundreds of others, was taken to Germany and incorporated into Göring’s collection. Many paintings from the Goudstikker gallery were identified after the War and returned to the Netherlands, where they were taken into the custody of the Dutch government. Goudstikker’s widow tried to recover the paintings taken by Göring, but the government rejected her claims. The paintings were instead dispersed among Dutch museums and government buildings. This painting was prominently displayed in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for decades. In 2006, following a reexamination of the way claims to artworks were handled in the aftermath of World War II, the Dutch government agreed to restitute 200 paintings that had belonged to Jacques Goudstikker to his family. This painting was among them. I worked with the family on that claim. In 2007, the painting was acquired by the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and I advised the family on the sale.
—F.K.L.
