Volume 53, Number 2 · February 9, 2006
White Secrets
By Sanford Schwartz
Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape
Catalog of the exhibition by Seymour Slive
an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 23, 2005– February 5, 2006; and the Royal Academy of Arts, London,February 25–June 4, 2006.
Royal Academy of Arts/Yale University Press, 278 pp., $75.00; $45.00 (paper)
What Jacob van Ruisdael's standing was in his own time is one of the many unknowns that swirl around him, but for well over two hundred years now he has been considered one of the formidable figures of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. He wasn't an unpredictable and world-bestriding genius like Rembrandt, an invigorating and endearing powerhouse of a painter like Hals, or a celestial perfectionist like Vermeer. But for admirers and scholars of Dutch painting, Ruisdael's landscapes, with their dark green and brown forests, their often embattled-seeming lone trees, their immense gray-white skies brimming with huge clouds, and their sense of nature as a setting for elemental dramatic encounters, take a place in the next level down from the pinnacle of Rembrandt, Hals, and Vermeer.
Review, 3410 words
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