SECTION XIII JACOB VAN RUISDAEL JACOB VAN RUISDAEL was born at Haarlem in 1628 or 1629, and died in that town in March 1682. He was buried on March 14 as a pauper. His father Isack was a frame-maker, and, as is shown by references to his pictures in seventeenth-century inventories, he practised painting at least as a subsidiary profession, though no pictures which can be definitely attributed to his hand have as yet been discovered. Jacob may have had his first lessons from his father, but he probably soon went as a pupil to his uncle, the meritorious Salomon van Ruysdael, who had a son of the same name and almost of the same age. He inclined less than did his cousin to the style of his uncle, and soon came under the influence of another Haarlem landscape-painter named Cornelisz Vroom, son of Hendrik Cornelisz Vroom the sea-painter. There is a great similarity between the rare works of this highly gifted artist and Ruisdael's youthful pictures of the years 1 646-9, in the careful and almost laboured treatment of foliage and of the ground with its details. There is also an affinity between Ruisdael's work and the pictures of a Haarlem painter of about the same age who has lately been brought into prominence again, namely, Gerrit van Hees, who was probably a fellow-pupil with Ruisdael under Vroom, and by whom there are dated pictures from 1650 onwards. Indeed, recently in the Maurice Kann sale a characteristic work by Van Hees was sold and paid for as a Ruisdael. Ruisdael lived till about the middle of the fifties (1655) at Haarlem, and then migrated to Amsterdam, where he obtained civic rights in 1659. Shortly before his death he returned poor and sick to his birthplace, and died there in the poorhouse. Ruisdael also travelled. Places on the North Sea coast, from Egmond to The Hague, are to be recognised in the pictures that survive. Schiedam is mentioned in a sale-catalogue. The Zuyder Zee coast near Naarden, the castle of Kronenburg on the Vecht, and that of Loevestein at the junction of the Maas and the Waal also occur ; and there is a famous picture (105) in the Rijksmuseum of the stately wind-mill at Wijk bij Duurstede, in the neighbourhood of which one may find the precise spot from which the picture was painted. Again, near the castle of Bentheim VOL. IV I B
