Winter landscape with dead tree

Winter Landscape with Dead Tree from around 1660 at the Hermitage combines winter scenery with the memento mori symbolism of the dead tree. Ruisdael's winter paintings often carry undertones of vanitas meditation on mortality and the passing of time. Ruisdael's winter scenes use a restrained palette of grey, white, and ochre applied with careful wet-on-wet glazing to capture diffuse winter light. Frozen canals doubled as roads in seventeenth-century Holland, making these scenes economically a...

The skeletal dead tree provides a stark vertical accent in the frozen landscape. Ruisdael's restrained winter palette and the contrast between the living and dead vegetation create a scene of contemplative beauty.