View of a Forest

View of a Forest of 1646, once in the collection later known as the Hermann Göring Collection and now in a dispersed post-war location, is among Van Ruisdael's earliest forest paintings — executed when he was barely seventeen or eighteen years old. The close-up forest interior, with its tangled trunks and filtered light, was a subject he essentially pioneered in Dutch painting: earlier artists had favored open panoramas and river views, and the dark enclosed forest as a primary subject was largely Van Ruisdael's invention. His precocious commitment to this subject from the very beginning of his career is remarkable, suggesting that his choice of the forest interior was not a commercial calculation but a genuine personal artistic vision. The provenance history of this work, touching the Nazi collecting apparatus, is a reminder that Van Ruisdael's paintings were among the most actively collected Dutch old masters in Germany before and during the Second World War.

Ruisdael fills the picture plane with vertical tree trunks that block any distant view, creating a sense of enclosure. Dappled light filters through the canopy above. The ground is built up in warm browns and greens with energetic, directional brushwork in the foliage.