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Lot Essay
Winter landscapes are particularly rare in Salomon van Ruysdael’s otherwise expansive oeuvre, accounting for only about twenty of his known works (see P. Sutton, Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, Boston, 1987, p. 475). He embraced the subject at two distinctive points in his career. First, as a young painter Ruysdael set about painting the snow covered Dutch countryside, exhibiting the influence of Hendrick Avercamp and Esais van de Velde. In the middle of his career he took a twenty-year hiatus from the subject and in the intervening decades focused his attentions on river landscapes, experimenting with a limited palette in accordance with the prevailing tonal style in Haarlem. In the 1650s Ruysdael once again returned to the winter landscape, now with an entirely new approach to landscape painting that favored a classicizing idiom, utilizing plays of atmospheric light and the fleeting effects of weather to imbue the Dutch landscape with a new sense of grandeur.
When this work first appeared at auction in 1994, the catalogue note cites a letter by Wolfgang Stechow, in which the scholar dates this skating scene to Ruysdael’s mature period of production, circa 1655-1660. Here, below billowing clouds a frozen canal unfurls, dotted with figures skating and riding horse-drawn sleighs. Along the bank at the right, a tent offers refreshments to skaters and horses alike. The sky and frozen water meet becoming almost indiscernible from each other in the far distance, exemplifying Ruysdael’s mastery of the depiction of reflected light along the ice.
At left, the large tower can be identified as the Plompetoren, accompanied by the smaller towers De Vos and De Beer along the ramparts. The Plompetoren was built in the 12th century as part of Utrecht’s defensive fortifications representing one of four water-gates along the old city walls. Although Ruysdael worked exclusively in Haarlem, he travelled extensively in the Netherlands, often including recognizable landmarks in his idealized Dutch landscapes, but did not strictly adhere to geography. He painted the Plompetoren on at least one other occasion (fig. 1, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich), in which the tower is removed from its urban context and planted alongside an idyllic country road. In both the Munich painting and the present work the Plompetoren is separated from the city’s ring wall and used to anchor one side of the composition. The church visible in the distance of the present work resembles the Jacobkerck, the starting point for Dutch pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago. In reality, however, the church would not have been visible from the viewer's vantage point along the canals outside the city walls.
When this work first appeared at auction in 1994, the catalogue note cites a letter by Wolfgang Stechow, in which the scholar dates this skating scene to Ruysdael’s mature period of production, circa 1655-1660. Here, below billowing clouds a frozen canal unfurls, dotted with figures skating and riding horse-drawn sleighs. Along the bank at the right, a tent offers refreshments to skaters and horses alike. The sky and frozen water meet becoming almost indiscernible from each other in the far distance, exemplifying Ruysdael’s mastery of the depiction of reflected light along the ice.
At left, the large tower can be identified as the Plompetoren, accompanied by the smaller towers De Vos and De Beer along the ramparts. The Plompetoren was built in the 12th century as part of Utrecht’s defensive fortifications representing one of four water-gates along the old city walls. Although Ruysdael worked exclusively in Haarlem, he travelled extensively in the Netherlands, often including recognizable landmarks in his idealized Dutch landscapes, but did not strictly adhere to geography. He painted the Plompetoren on at least one other occasion (fig. 1, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich), in which the tower is removed from its urban context and planted alongside an idyllic country road. In both the Munich painting and the present work the Plompetoren is separated from the city’s ring wall and used to anchor one side of the composition. The church visible in the distance of the present work resembles the Jacobkerck, the starting point for Dutch pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago. In reality, however, the church would not have been visible from the viewer's vantage point along the canals outside the city walls.