Landscape with a Waterfall

Landscape with a Waterfall, painted around 1655 and now in the Ashmolean Museum Oxford, belongs to the early development of van Ruisdael's waterfall series — a subject he was exploring intensively in the mid-1650s as Allaert van Everdingen's Norwegian landscapes began to circulate more widely through Amsterdam's art market. The Ashmolean, founded in 1683 as the world's first university museum, holds a distinguished collection of Dutch Golden Age paintings assembled through Oxford's scholarly connections with European art. This relatively early waterfall example shows van Ruisdael still working out the compositional grammar of the cascade subject — the placement of rocks, trees, and falling water — that he would systematize into a highly developed format in his mature 1660s waterfall paintings.

The waterfall cascades through a rocky landscape with Ruisdael's characteristic handling of white water and dark stone. The atmospheric rendering of mist and spray demonstrates his mastery of natural phenomena.