Although relatively little known this beautiful and poetic landscape epitomises the qualities that made Jacob van Ruisdael the most important and influential Dutch landscape painter of the seventeenth century. It was painted in Haarlem probably around 1650, when Ruisdael was still a very young painter in his early twenties, and must be counted among the masterpieces of his early career. Though a very youthful work, in its detached but close observation of nature, with its attention on the distribution of light and shade beneath the great vault of the sky, and the insignificance of man beneath it, the canvas already carries within it the hallmarks of the master’s mature landscape vision. It has for nearly two centuries formed part of the celebrated collects ions at Narford Hall in Norfolk, the seat of the Fountaine family, and appears on the open market now for the first t.mes in its known history.

Like all great landscape painters Ruisdael was keenly sensitive to the effects of light and space and the dramatic effects inherent in nature. Here, on the banks of a quiet country river, we see a woman drawing water from a well beside her dilapidated cottage; behind her on the far bank a crumbling stone bridge and the fields beyond it are caught in a sudden blaze of golden sunlight, which offers a dramatic contrast with the lowering sky, its masses of grey rain laden clouds gathering over distant hills. The half bare tree beside the cottage is powerfully silhouetted against the sky and a small flock of birds is similarly caught momentarily in the sunlight. There are few people present, for to Ruisdael man and his activities were simply one part of the spectacle of nature; beyond the bridge we see only two tiny figures in the fields and a solitary walker hurrying home before the coming rain. The whole scene is underpinned by a close observation of nature itself. The yellowing leaves of the tree, the golden stubble of the harvested grainfields beyond and the smoke rising from the chimney all suggest that this is a late summer scene, with the onset of autumn already in the air. The crumbling brickwork of the old bridge, the old dovecote and the half-repaired thatch and tiles of the cottage are all meticulously captured. The slightly elevated viewpoint imparts an air of calm detachment to the scene.

The present canvas forms part of a small group of early landscapes dating from the late 1640s to around 1650, which represent in many ways the culmination of the first phase of Ruisdael’s career. All are test.mes nt to the astonishing precocity of his development as a painter of landscape. In particular the Fountaine canvas shares many details with a River landscape with a ruined stone bridge today in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson collects ion (fig. 1).¹ Here we find a very similar old brick bridge, with an identical winding stair beside it and similar crude timber repairs. The viewpoint is much lower and closer, and the open fields in the present canvas are replaced by a mass of trees and a farm in the centre. A very similar pale view of hills can be seen in the distance beyond. The many parallels between the two pictures led Slive to surmise that the smaller Philadelphia canvas, which he dated to the late 1640s, ‘…may have been the point of departure for the artist’s more extensive and atmospheric river landscape formerly [sic] in the…Fountaine collects ion… which is datable a few years later’.² Certainly, the higher viewpoint used in the present work and the greater breadth and openness in the sky thereby achieved suggests that Ruisdael was searching for (and succeeded in conveying) a greater sense of atmosphere in the later work. Ruisdael’s interest in portraying the details of decaying man-made riverside structures had already been explored in other works of this date, a good example being the Landscape with an angler upon a stone bridge in the Kaufman collects ion, Norfolk, Virginia, which Slive dates around 1649, and such subjects would remain an important aspect of his work for the remainder of his career.³ The dramatic coulisse of the tree set against the darkening sky on the left of the picture is reminiscent of Ruisdael's great early masterpiece, the Landscape with banks of a river of 1649 now in the Torrie collects ion, University of Edinburgh (fig. 2).⁴ Remarkably, Ruisdael is not known to have had a teacher,⁵ but this motif was very likely derived from his study of the work of his older contemporary in Haarlem, Cornelis Hendricksz. Vroom (1591–1661), who made use of it in several works. Good examples include the Landscape with a waterfall of 1638 in the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem,⁶ or the River landscape sold London, Replica Shoes ’s, 22 April 2009, lot 160 (fig. 3). The tender mood and refined detail of Vroom’s landscapes seems to have been an important influence on the young painter, although Ruisdael’s striving for broader effects would soon transcend the work of the older master.

This landscape was brought to modern attention for the first t.mes only in 1988 when it was included in the seminal exhibition of Dutch paintings in Norfolk at the Castle Museum in Norwich. The exhibition was test.mes nt to the astute collects ing activities of Andrew Fountaine IV (1808–1873) at Narford Hall, and in particular his interest in the work of Jacob van Ruisdael. Fountaine was much the most significant collects or at Narford since his celebrated forebear, Sir Andrew Fountaine (1676–1743), the builder of the house, a friend of Pope and Swift, and one of the most individual and important Grand Tour collects ors of the mid-eighteenth century, and indeed he succeeded in building upon and enhancing this remarkable legacy.⁷ The present painting is one of four works by Ruisdael that Andrew Fountaine IV bought, all of which were later seen by Gustav Waagen when he visited Narford. The picture was certainly in his collects ion by 1840, when he exhibited it at the British Gallery under the title ‘Landscape, ruined bridge’, but its history before this date remains unclear. Fountaine’s own notes in the Family Book kept in the Library at Narford state that it came from the collects ion of ‘The Duke de Paramont’ in Vienna.⁸ This is most probably an anglicised reference to an Austrian Erzherzog or Archduke, meaning any male member of the Imperial Hapsburg family, whose numbers are too numerous to permit a specific identification. Waagen’s descriptions of the four Ruisdaels at Narford are fulsome but rather vague, though he was clearly impressed by the group as a whole, which he thought represented Ruisdael ‘…in all his excellence’. The present canvas is probably that he described as ‘A sea-coast [sic] with clouded sky. Of the utmost delicacy both in touch and gradation of tones’.⁹ Another, described by him as ‘A flat country with sunny fields’ – a description that might also pass for the present work – was probably the River scene in Holland that Andrew Fountaine also lent to the British Gallery exhibition of 1840; this is most likely identifiable with a Panoramic view of a shore, grainfields and dunes, which according to the Family Book came from the ‘Duval collects ion’ in Geneva, and which still remains in private hands.¹⁰ The year before Fountaine had purchased a third Ruisdael from the dealer John Smith in London, a large Seapiece formerly in the Van Iddekinge collects ion in Amsterdam, which was highly praised by Waagen, who described it as ‘…of the most surprising truth, and of peculiar poetry’. Last recorded on the New York art market in 2000,¹¹ this is in fact, not by Ruisdael himself, but the work of an unknown contemporary.¹² The last painting was a ‘very small’ and rather beautiful oil on canvas entitled View from the dunes to the sea, which Fountaine himself described as ‘treated with great breadth’ and which is today in the Kunsthaus, Zurich, Stiftung Prof. Dr. L. Ruzicka.¹³ Fountaine’s taste for the works of Ruisdael, though evidently discerning, was not unusual among British connoisseurs of the mid-nineteenth century, for whom the painter aroused feelings of romantic nature in both painters and collects ors alike. As Moore observes, the British love of Ruisdael had been in evidence since the mid-eighteenth century before taking ‘hold of the imagination of the British collects or in the early nineteenth century’.¹⁴

It was precisely these ‘romantic’ qualities in the Fountaine landscape that prefigure the development that Ruisdael’s work would undergo around 1650. In or around that same year he embarked on his travels in the Dutch-German border regions, and his art would as a result acquire a new monumentality, more vibrant colour and an increasingly romantic or ‘heroic’ mood. A bold emphasis on mass and contrast of light would replace traditional compositional arrangements such as the elevated viewpoint he used in the present work. These mature works were to prove a significant influence not only on Ruisdael’s Dutch contemporaries, notably his pupil Meindert Hobbema (1638–1709), but also on many later artists, among them Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), John Constable (1776–1837) and the Norwich School in England, the painters of the Barbizon School in France and those of the Hudson River School in America. As Constable himself wrote: ‘Ruisdael… delighted in, and has made delightful to our eyes, those solemn days, peculiar to his country and to ours, when without storm, large rolling clouds scarcely permit a ray of sunlight to break the shades of the forest. By these effects he enveloped the most ordinary scenes of grandeur…’.¹⁵

Old Master Paintings

A Very British Legacy

¹ Inv. no. 570, canvas, 36.2 x 52.1 cm. Slive 2001, p. 377, no. 517, reproduced.

² Slive 2001, p. 377.

³ Slive 2001, p. 376, no. 514, reproduced.

⁴ Exhibited Philadelphia, Los Angeles and London, Jacob van Ruisdael. Master of landscape, 2005–06, no. 12. Slive 2001, pp. 365–66, no. 496, reproduced.

⁵ He may have trained with his father Isaack van Ruisdael (1599–1677), himself a landscape painter, or his uncle Salomon van Ruysdael (1602–1670), of the greatest exponents of the ‘tonal’ phase of Dutch landscape painting.

⁶ See F.N. Walford, Jacob van Ruisdael and the perception of landscape, New Haven and London 1991, p. 71, reproduced.

⁷ He also greatly enlarged the collects ion of decorative arts to include Palissy Ware, Limoges enamels, rock crystals, carved ivories and Greek and Roman coins. The collects ion was largely dispersed by a series of auctions in 1884, 1894 and 1904.

⁸ Cited in Moore 1988, p. 147.

⁹ Waagen 1854, p. 430. The picture was subsequently correctly and accurately described by Hofstede de Groot (1912, no. 670).

¹⁰ Exhibited Norwich 1988, no. 116, as ‘A view of the Lake of Haarlem’.

¹¹ Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 25 May 2000, lot 30.

¹² Slive 2001, p. 668, no. Dub.155, reproduced. Both this and that in the note below were sold in Fountaine’s sale at Christie’s, London, 7 July 1894, lots 33 and 34 respectively.

¹³ 26 x 35.2 cm. Slive 2001, p. 446, no. 634, reproduced.

¹⁴ Moore 1988, p. 148.

¹⁵ Third lecture to the Royal Academy. See C.R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, London 1951, p. 318. Cited in Moore 1988 p. 148.