The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede
This name looks like someone fell asleep at the typewriter. Actually, this is the name of the most popular painting in Holland after masterpieces by Rembrandt and Vermeer. Art historians have a simple criterion for gauging the popularity of a work of art - it’s the number of postcard reproductions that are sold. In the Netherlands, not surprisingly, the best-selling art postcard is Rembrandt’s “Night Watch”, second is Vermeer’s “View of Deift” and third is Frans Hal’s “Laughing Cavalier”, right?. Wrong. It’s “The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede” by Jacob van Ruisdael.
Ruisdael was the finest Dutch painter of landscape in an age when this modest genre had just been brought to the level of high art by other Dutch painters. Ruisdael may also be the greatest Dutch painter after the Rembrandt- Hals -Vermeer triumvirate. His more than 700 surviving paintings are scattered throughout the museums of the world.
Little is known of Ruisdael’s life, no portraits’ of him, no words of his or comments on him by his contemporaries survive. He was born in Haarlem in 1628 or 1629 to Isaack van Ruisdael, a framemaker who apparently dabbled in painting. Isaack’s brother, Salomon van Ruisdael, was a noted landscapist who may have taught the young Jacob.
Characteristic of Ruisdael’s landscapes are big billowing clouds which seem to change shapes and move even as you look at them. Tiny houses and windmills meticulously rendered may be crammed into the lower third of a canvas dominated by enormous gray clouds and patches of faint blue sky. These are magical pictures because Ruisdael’s intentions remain ambiguous, open to many interpretations. “Nature here is conceived in its fundamental instability where everything may change at any moment and these landscapes are through their particular formal properties, symbolic of human existence”.
This was my first oil painting after experimenting with small canvas acrylics and one oil stilllife, and first large scale canvas.
Oil on canvas, 1982