Hilly Landscape

Hilly Landscape of 1652, now at the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Brunswick, belongs to the series of works van Ruisdael painted in the period immediately following his journey to the Dutch-German border, when the memory of elevated terrain was fresh and generative. The Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, one of Germany's oldest public art collections founded in the early eighteenth century, holds this early Ruisdael as part of its significant Dutch Golden Age collection. The hilly landscape format introduced compositional possibilities — elevated viewpoints, diagonal recession across slopes, the interplay of wooded hillside and open valley — that the flat Dutch interior denied. Van Ruisdael used these hilly compositions to expand the range of Dutch landscape painting, demonstrating that the tradition was capable of addressing terrain beyond the polders, canals, and dunes of the western Netherlands.

A pronounced diagonal from foreground slope to distant valley provides compositional structure. Van Ruisdael renders the varied foliage with attention to the different textures of oak, birch, and other species. The sky above the hills is active and partially stormy, contributing to the elevated emotional register of the scene.