1) The study establishes key themes and their variations, the prevalence in Ruisdael’s work of environments which portray both worked and waste land, and the significant combination of his meticulous rendering of vital forms within carefully constructed environments. 2) It analyzes the gap between the unfruitful and rough terrain Ruisdael sought out in places where he lived and traveled, and the landscapes he represented. The significance of Ruisdael’s choices become evident when we recognize that though he conveyed the characteristics of these environments and paid close attention to the specifics of the indigenous scene, he mostly ignored their actual ongoing transformation through the significant removal of sand dunes and peat, rerouting of streams and embankments, and the making of country homes, gardens, and agricultural land. Each chapter of this study examines the ways Ruisdael constructs environments that mix waste and worked land and analyzes how his choice of motifs and handling of materials are intrinsic to the meaning of these pictures as he works out variations within each theme. 3) It examines Ruisdael’s continued engagement with that which cannot easily be portrayed—time, duration, motion, and the vitality of living things. Though a painter not a natural philosopher, his probing vision and endeavor to depict the unpicturable bears similarities with their approach to investigating nature. Like them, his laborious reworking of themes across media reveals that his rendering of the specifics of the natural world was based in understanding. For Ruisdael, attention to the way things work did not preclude wonder. Indeed, an ecological perspective helps to explain why meaning in his paintings cannot be separated from formal means; significance, here, is rooted in attempting to understand the processes of the visible world.… This book examines Jacob van Ruisdael's treatment of five subjects—dunes, grainfields, ruins, rushing water, and woodlands—that recur throughout his career. The paintings, though fictive, show close attention to the complexities of particular environments that can be fruitfully considered “ecological.” The pattern of Ruisdael’s reworking each environment and associated phenomena shows him as laboring over these themes. His work across media conveys something of his demanding and methodical procedure as he sought to achieve pictorially the force, temporality, vitality, and motion of nature. Ruisdael’s paintings decenter humankind within familiar yet reimagined landscapes. His ability to depict nature’s dynamism provided an alternative vision at a foundational moment when landscape, increasingly manipulated and controlled, was most often considered property and investment. His focus on the techniques and processes of his own work to render these entities was essential to his ecological perspective and invites a similar recognition from an attentive viewer.
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