Monumental scenes

Today, Jacob van Ruisdael is commonly considered the greatest Dutch landscape painter from the second half of the 17th century. That wasn’t exactly the case when he was alive (1628/’29-1682), painting first in Haarlem and then, after he turned 28 and began to mature as an artist, in Amsterdam. Ruisdael was reasonably successful in selling his work for good (if not exceptional) prices in the new commercial art market that had emerged, and he was well regarded among his artist-peers in the Guild of St. Luke. But the best landscapist of Holland’s late Golden Age? That assessment came only in retrospect.

It holds up too. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the first survey of Ruisdael’s work in almost 25 years offers a splendid opportunity to understand how and why that opinion has taken hold.

Seymour Slive, the former Harvard professor who organized the last great Ruisdael show, in 1981, and whose complete catalog of Ruisdael’s paintings, drawings and prints was published in 2001 -- has assembled 47 paintings from American and European museums and private collections. Among them is the famous “The Jewish Cemetery” (1655) from Dresden, one of two versions of a rare allegorical landscape by the artist. (The other, larger version is in Detroit.) And, of course, “The Great Oak” (1652) is on hand, a startling work in which a magnificent tree assumes the epic proportions of the hero in a Greek myth -- Hercules as tall timber. It was a 1991 gift to LACMA from Hannah and the late Edward Carter.

The show is only a small fraction of Ruisdael’s output; more than 700 paintings are known. And, for reasons that are not clear, the selections of drawings and etchings that will be seen when the show travels to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Royal Academy in London next year are unfortunately not included here. (A LACMA spokesman says that conservation concerns intervened, but he did not elaborate.) The paintings, however, have been chosen with a clear eye toward covering all of the artist’s bases: Ruisdael’s youthful precocity, his wide range of favored subjects and his evolving attitude toward the Dutch landscape, as the republic of Holland emerged as the most prosperous nation in Europe.

The curator also wants to underscore his belief that it’s a mistake to interpret these landscapes as symbol-strewn fables of morality -- sermonizing being a habit in a lot of 17th century Dutch art. The show is convincing in that regard.

It reveals an artist of much greater conceptual complexity than one who merely equated a dead tree stump with human mortality or proposed the rural industry of bleaching linen as a conscientious symbol for the purity of Protestant Christian values. The soul, unlike the laundry, is rarely whiter than white.

But it’s easy to see how those readings could flourish. Not only is there precedent for that sort of thing in Dutch painting, but there’s also the dramatic power of “The Jewish Cemetery” -- an anomaly in Ruisdael’s career, because the painting is surely allegorical.

Mortality and ancient struggle are inherent in the very subject of a Jewish burial ground, and Ruisdael took the theme and ran with it. He pumped up the subject of life’s vanity and transience through the addition of obvious, even corny elements. There’s a rushing stream (life’s river), a ruined castle (power lost), a blasted tree stump and a dying birch (sudden death versus natural decline). Dark clouds billow overhead (inescapable doom!).

Despite this emphasis on the bleak futility of human endeavor, he also added notes of heavenly hope. Sunlight bursts through the cloudy sky, and, at the left, a gracefully arched rainbow appears.

The site of the Portuguese Jewish cemetery in the village of Ouderkerk, near Amsterdam, that is the basis for this work had no roaring brook or monumental ruin. (Two drawings that will be seen in Philadelphia and London, but not L.A., make the topography plain.) The land was also resolutely flat -- this is coastal Holland, after all -- and did not rise to a dramatic hill surmounted by a castle. That invented motif was one Ruisdael developed a few years earlier, in wonderful pictures of Bentheim Castle in Westphalia, near the German border.

Three charming paintings of Bentheim are on view, including a terrific one from the National Gallery of Ireland. An excruciatingly detailed hillock in the foreground slams up against the huge stone fortress represented in the far distance. This pictorial juxtaposition of near and far puts dainty leaves and tiny flowers right next to the huge turrets and stone ramparts of an imposing citadel. The stunning visual effect is to monumentalize nature while naturalizing a monument. Ruisdael, who was not yet 25 when he painted the extraordinary scene, rapidly developed an arsenal of surprising painterly skills.

In “The Jewish Cemetery,” he pulled out all the stops. The precision and accuracy of a botanical illustrator meet the theatrical panache and picturesque flourish of a scenic designer.

Ruisdael usually painted “wet on wet,” starting with a dusky background to broadly articulate the spaces. Then he added successive layers from dark to light, as the image proceeded to the foreground. Last came the sparkling highlights. In the cemetery the blazing whites on the waterfall, the birch and the clouds all circle around the flat panel of a broken, dappled tombstone near the center. The death-marker glows white-hot as the focal point of the scene.

It’s a spectacularly beautiful painting -- and no less a master than 19th century British landscapist John Constable absolutely hated it.

Rather, he hated the Detroit version, which is the one he likely saw; but if he’d come across the Dresden picture, he surely would have dissed that one too. Slive notes in the show’s excellent catalog that Constable considered the picture a failure precisely because it was an allegory -- because, Constable said, “there are ruins to indicate old age, a stream to signify the course of life, and rocks and precipices to shadow forth its dangers. But how are we to discover all this?”

In other words, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Constable admired Ruisdael’s other paintings -- he copied more than one -- because of their naturalism. His own work owed a lot to the Dutchman’s. But the morality play that unfolds in “The Jewish Cemetery” was a holdover from an earlier, fading society. Old attitudes are interred there.

Artistically, Ruisdael was a harbinger of what would later become a modern faith: the conviction that the world can be understood in scientific and experiential terms, without recourse to spiritual or supernatural explanations. His landscapes anticipate by a couple of centuries the Barbizon, Hudson River, Impressionist and other naturalist painting schools.

Born into a family of artists, Ruisdael developed technical skills early. And he was ambitious. His “Dune Landscape,” dated 1646, is a remarkably sophisticated orchestration of vegetation, vistas, light and color. Its large size -- almost 5 feet wide -- is imposing, and the degree of natural observation is acute. When you realize Ruisdael was 17 or 18 when he painted it, it’s even more impressive.

That’s not to say that Ruisdael faithfully recorded only what he saw. He didn’t, as the cemetery inventions show. The exhibition includes a group of remarkable paintings of wooded Scandinavian waterfalls, all pounding torrents and towering firs -- absolutely convincing landscapes, even though Ruisdael never set foot in Norway, Sweden or Denmark. He almost always made things up -- and not just the ruin and the rushing stream in the Jewish cemetery but that commanding hill from which Bentheim Castle looms as well. Invented or not, however, all of it grew from incisive observation.

A sense of monumentality is also pervasive in Ruisdael’s art, regardless of the physical size of the painting. A late view of some ruins in a sun-drenched field outside Haarlem grabs you by the lapels from across the room. Barely 16 inches square, it seems to depict half of Europe. For an art that arose along with Holland to become an influential international powerhouse, shaping future destinies, monumentality is a reasonable attribute.

Yet it isn’t just the landscape of his homeland that Ruisdael wanted to aggrandize; he wasn’t merely a propagandist for his nation, rather than a church. Instead, his art monumentalizes human perception. Constable understood that, and this lovely exhibition likewise makes it plain.

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‘Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

When: Noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays; noon to 9 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Closed Wednesdays.

Ends: Sept. 18

Price: $5 to $9

Contact: (323) 857-6000, www.lacma.org