Jacob van Ruisdael: His Art and His Market

Born into a family of landscape painters in Haarlem in 1628 or 1629, Jacob van Ruisdael was the son of the artist Isaack van Ruisdael and the nephew of the well-known painter Salomon van Ruysdael. Scholars often assume one or both of these artists taught Jacob his craft, although there is no record of his earliest program of study. His first dated painting is from 1646, two years before he was admitted as a member of the local Guild of St. Luke. Ruisdael's early maturity coincided with a boom in landscape painting, which, in the Netherlands at that time, was on par with history painting in popularity.

 

Ruisdael moved to Amsterdam in 1657 for the same reason as a number of his compatriots did, namely a bigger market and the prospect of greater commercial success; he remained there for the rest of his life, taking on pupils, the most famous of which was Meindert Hobbema. A versatile painter, he experimented with a wide range of landscape subjects, including marines, dense woodlands, raging rivers and townscapes. Ruisdael's variety resulted in innovation in a number of different areas. His interest in atmospheric conditions, especially clouds, stands as an early precursor to the plein-air painting of the 19th Century. His more topographical views, especially of cities, offer a valuable historical record of the landscape and cityscape of the 17th century Netherlands. His pictures of windmills have become cultural icons of his nation. He is also often credited as a father of romantic, even sublime, painting, a century before these concepts were first codified. He sought out dramatic views, often at odds with the geography of his Dutch homelands, both in his travels and with his imagination.

 

Much like Claude Lorrain with J.M.W. Turner, Ruisdael is less popularly known, in Britain today at least, than the painter he most famously influenced, John Constable. Ruisdael is, however, an artist with a formidably high art-historical reputation, and commercial track record. Although he travelled comparatively little, he did visit Germany, possibly with Hobbema, and his paintings were highly valued in his own lifetime. A large-scale study of picture inventories in the Netherlands of 1650s, 60s and 70s show his works to have been, on average, the seventh most valuable, when grouped by artist.

The National Gallery, London, has the largest holding of Ruisdael pictures anywhere, with 20 works by the artist, four more than the Rijksmuseum in his native Amsterdam. These works almost uniformly entered the national collection in the 19th Century from British collections. Whilst Ruisdael's reputation had been established in his lifetime and recognised ever since, his work, certainly in Britain, seems to have found a new level of appreciation in the 19th Century. in the mid to late-19th Century, his works were selling at high prices at auction, often in excess of 1,000 gns. This commercial clamour is mirrored by the fact that so many works were secured for the national collection in a relatively short period of time.

Today, paintings by Ruisdael remain extremely prized and valuable. There are 11 auctions results from the past few decades of over $1m. There are of course examples of painters who were not well-known in their day - Vermeer is an example - which have reached stratospheric commercial, but it can be said that, whilst his market has not exploded in the 20th Century as it did in the 19th, Ruisdael is still holding his own, as he did in his lifetime.