The sky as theatre: Jacob van ruisdael and the tormented soul of dutch landscapes
Imagine an autumn morning in Haarlem, 1655. The mist still clings to the dunes, but already a young man with sharp eyes is pacing the sandy paths, a sketchbook in hand. He stops before an old oak twisted by the wind, watches the clouds gathering on the horizon for a long time, then quickly traces a few strokes of charcoal. This is no ordinary walker: Jacob van Ruisdael, then in his early twenties, is capturing far more than trees and hills. He is trying to seize the very soul of Holland—this flat land, battered by the wind, where the sky weighs as much as the earth, where every cloud seems to carry an omen.
By Artedusa
••10 min readWhat strikes one about Ruisdael is not merely his technical mastery—though his skies, painted with glazes of Prussian blue and lead white, remain unmatched. It is his ability to transform a simple landscape into a dramatic scene, almost Shakespearean. His canvases do not represent nature: they stage it, like a backdrop for an unseen drama. In The Jewish Cemetery (c. 1655), the ruins of a Gothic abbey rise amid skeletal trees, while a pale rainbow pierces the storm clouds. It feels like a metaphor for the human condition—fleeting beauty, fragility before the elements, the divine presence glimpsed in the interstices of light.
Yet Ruisdael was neither a cursed painter nor a misunderstood genius. The son of a modest frame-maker from Haarlem, he grew up in the shadow of his uncle Salomon van Ruysdael, a respected landscapist. But where Salomon painted serene, almost decorative scenes, Jacob chose a darker, more intense path. His contemporaries sometimes found him too melancholic, too "German" in his approach—his landscapes of ruined castles and wild forests clashed with the meticulous order of other Dutch masters. But today, it is precisely this singularity that places him among the greatest: Ruisdael did not merely paint Holland. He revealed its sublime.
01When the sky becomes a character
If you observe one of Ruisdael’s paintings, your gaze will first be drawn to the sky. Not the trees, not the houses, not even the human figures—often tiny, almost insignificant. No, it is the clouds that dominate, sometimes occupying three-quarters of the composition. And what a sky! Not the uniform blues of Italian painters, but tormented heavens where cloud masses clash in infinite shades—from pearl grey to ink black, through dazzling whites that seem to radiate from within.
Take The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede (c. 1670), one of his most famous works. The windmill itself, a symbol of Dutch ingenuity, stands proudly in the foreground. But what captivates is the sky behind it: a swirl of low clouds, streaked with light, as if a storm has just passed or is about to break. Ruisdael does not merely represent the sky—he turns it into an actor in its own right. These clouds are not there to fill space: they tell a story. They carry the memory of past storms, the threat of those to come, and that shifting light which, depending on the hour, can transform everything.
Art historians have long debated this obsession with the sky. Some see the influence of Calvinism, a religion that places man before a God who is both omnipresent and elusive. Others suggest a more earthly fascination: in a country where the land is so flat, the sky naturally becomes the realm of all possibilities. But perhaps the answer is simpler. Ruisdael, like Turner after him, had grasped a fundamental truth: the sky is never static. It is the theatre where the eternal drama of light and shadow plays out.
02Holland, or the art of painting absence
There is something strangely empty in Ruisdael’s landscapes. Not empty in the sense of desolate—his canvases teem with details: trees, paths, rivers, windmills. But empty in the sense that man is always an intruder, a fleeting passerby. In View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields (c. 1670), the human figures are reduced to tiny silhouettes, lost amid the vast expanses of linen spread out to dry in the sun. They do not dominate the landscape: they are part of it, like the birds or the clouds.
This approach contrasts sharply with that of Italian or French painters of the same period. In Poussin or Claude Lorrain, landscapes serve as backdrops for mythological or historical scenes. The figures play a central role, and nature exists to enhance them. In Ruisdael, it is the opposite: nature is the main subject, and man is just one element among others. Even in The Jewish Cemetery, where human presence is more pronounced (tombs, visitors can be made out), it is the skeletal trees and ruins that dominate. The figures are mere shadows, almost ghosts, as if Ruisdael wanted to remind us that in the face of nature’s immensity, we are only passing through.
This vision, almost "ecological" before its time, is no coincidence. At a time when Holland was in the midst of economic and colonial expansion, Ruisdael chose to celebrate not human conquests, but the fragile beauty of a constantly changing land. His landscapes are not postcards: they are meditations on time, on how nature always reclaims its rights. The windmills, so symbolic of Dutch mastery over the elements, eventually blend into the scenery. Ruined castles, like that of Bentheim, are nothing more than vestiges of a bygone era. And cemeteries, like that of Ouderkerk, remind us that even our most enduring monuments will one day disappear.
03The secret technique: when painting becomes alchemy
How did Ruisdael achieve such intensity in his canvases? The answer lies partly in his technical mastery, a subtle alchemy of scientific observation and poetic intuition.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, who worked almost exclusively in the studio, Ruisdael spent hours outdoors, sketching trees, dunes, and streams. These studies, often done in black chalk or charcoal, later served as the basis for his compositions. But he did not merely copy nature: he reinvented it. In The Great Forest (c. 1655), the trees are at once realistic and almost fantastical, as if plucked from a fairy tale. Their gnarled trunks and twisted branches seem to tell a story—that of a wild, untamed nature.
His palette, too, was revolutionary. Where tonalists like Jan van Goyen favoured monochromatic harmonies, Ruisdael dared striking contrasts. In The Rough Sea (c. 1670), the foaming waves, painted in lead white and Prussian blue, clash with the black clouds looming on the horizon. To achieve these effects of light, he used a glazing technique: layers of transparent paint superimposed to give his skies a nearly tangible depth.
But Ruisdael’s true secret may have lain in his way of playing with scale. In View of Haarlem, the bleaching fields in the foreground appear vast, almost infinite, while the city in the background seems tiny. This distortion is not a perspective error: it is a way of making us feel the immensity of the landscape, of reminding us that we are but fleeting visitors in a world far greater than ourselves.
04The Jewish Cemetery: a painting as enigma
Among all of Ruisdael’s works, The Jewish Cemetery (c. 1655) is undoubtedly the most mysterious—and the most discussed. At first glance, it is a landscape like any other: trees, ruins, a stormy sky. But on closer inspection, every detail seems charged with meaning.
The cemetery in question is not a real place, but an imaginary composition, blending elements of the Jewish cemetery at Ouderkerk aan de Amstel with the ruins of Egmond Abbey. Why this mix? Some historians see a religious allegory: the ruined abbey symbolising the decline of Catholicism, while the Jewish cemetery represents the persecution of a people. Others read it as a more personal meditation on death—Ruisdael had lost his father a few years earlier, and this painting could be a way of grieving.
But what strikes most is the atmosphere of the work. The skeletal trees, the leaning tombs, the rain-heavy clouds: everything seems to herald an impending catastrophe. And yet, in the upper left corner, a pale rainbow pierces the clouds. As if Ruisdael wanted to tell us that even in the darkest moments, a glimmer of hope remains.
This painting has fascinated far beyond the art world. The composer Louis Andriessen drew inspiration from it for his work De Materie, and the writer Donna Tartt made it a central element of her novel The Goldfinch. Proof that The Jewish Cemetery is not merely a 17th-century masterpiece: it is a work that continues to speak to subsequent generations, as if Ruisdael had captured something universal in this scene of desolation and rebirth.
05The invisible legacy: when Ruisdael inspires the moderns
Ruisdael had no true school, no official disciples. And yet, his influence on Western art is immense—even if it is often indirect.
In the 19th century, German and English Romantics saw him as a precursor. Caspar David Friedrich, in his melancholic landscapes, owes much to the atmosphere of Ruisdael’s canvases. Turner, for his part, studied his skies with an almost obsessive fascination. In The Shipwreck (1805), one finds the same dramatic light, the same tormented clouds that seem to swallow the ships.
Even more surprisingly, Ruisdael influenced far more contemporary artists. Vincent van Gogh, who admired his "intense emotion," copied several of his works. And in the 1970s, the filmmaker Wim Wenders included The Jewish Cemetery in a key scene of The American Friend, as a symbol of human fragility.
But Ruisdael’s most enduring legacy may lie in this idea that the landscape is not merely a backdrop, but a character in its own right. Today, when a photographer like Sebastião Salgado captures the tragic grandeur of nature, or when a filmmaker like Andrei Tarkovsky uses the elements to evoke the human soul, a little of Ruisdael resurfaces. For he was one of the first to understand that painting a landscape is not just about representing nature—it is about revealing its sublime.
06Why Ruisdael still speaks to us today
In an age when landscapes are often reduced to wallpaper or postcards, Ruisdael’s work reminds us of something essential: nature is not a backdrop. It is alive, ever-changing, sometimes threatening, sometimes soothing. It carries within it stories, emotions, mysteries.
His canvases are not windows onto an idealised world, like those of Claude Lorrain. They are mirrors held up to our own condition. When we look at The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede, we do not merely see a symbol of Holland: we feel the force of the wind, the threat of the storm, the fragility of these human constructions before the elements.
And perhaps that is Ruisdael’s true genius. He did not merely paint landscapes. He painted states of mind. He transformed Holland into a theatre where the great dramas of existence play out in silence: struggle, resilience, fleeting beauty, the invisible presence of the divine.
Today, as we grow increasingly disconnected from nature, his paintings resonate with renewed force. They remind us that the sky is not just a blue background, that trees are not mere urban furniture, and that landscapes are not just images—they are living beings, with whom we share a complex relationship, made of respect, fear, and sometimes, wonder.
Perhaps that is why, more than three centuries after his death, Jacob van Ruisdael continues to captivate us. Because he saw, in the monotonous plains of Holland, a poetry no one before him had dared to imagine. And because he transformed those landscapes into something universal: a mirror held up to our own soul.