Glade in a Wood

Jacob van Ruisdael, the most important representative of Haarlem landscape painting in the 17th century, went far into the depths of the woods in his early landscapes. In these woods the aim was to show the overgrown vegetation and the presiding darkness. Van Ruisdael developed a technique to achieve this by painting layers of structuring underpainting and then highlighting the individual forms of trunks, branches, and foliage out of the dark ground in a pointillist style.

Van Ruisdael filtered these landscapes through the study of nature. Yet he would never have seen the slice of scenery represented in this picture like this in nature. It is the total of a profusion of detail studies from nature that were composed into a whole only in the painter’s imagination back in the studio. The Glade in a Wood is an early work by the artist who was only about 18 (!) when he painted this.

We present today's painting thanks to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. : )

P.S. Many famous artists were connected to Haarlem. Check here nine reasons to smile with Frans Hals.