Wooded Landscape with Waterfall

Wooded Landscape with Waterfall from 1668 at the North Carolina Museum shows Ruisdael's mature waterfall compositions. These dramatic scenes reached American collections through active 19th-century collecting of Dutch Golden Age painting. Working from prints by Allart van Everdingen who had visited Scandinavia, Ruisdael constructed convincing cascades using fluid, energetic paint handling for the white water and dense impasto for mossy rocks. These proto-Romantic subjects prefigure the Sublim...

Dense woodland frames the cascade with dramatic light-dark contrasts. Ruisdael's confident handling of water, rock, and vegetation creates a scene of powerful natural energy.