Wooded Landscape with a Pool and Figures
Jacob van Ruisdael·1660
Historical Context
Wooded Landscape with a Pool and Figures, painted around 1660 on panel and now at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, belongs to the woodland pool series that represents van Ruisdael's most contemplative landscape mode. The Norton Simon Museum, assembled by the industrialist Norton Simon in the mid-twentieth century and housed in a building designed for the collection in Pasadena, California, holds a distinguished group of Dutch Golden Age paintings including several significant van Ruisdaels. The pool at the composition's center creates a space of natural stillness, the surrounding forest sealing it from external disturbance and the reflective water doubling the landscape above. The small figures, characteristic staffage that populate many of his forest-and-water subjects, provide human scale without claiming the landscape's contemplative space as their own.
Technical Analysis
The pool creates a reflective surface amid the dense woodland. Ruisdael's handling of still water reflecting trees and sky creates atmospheric depth within the contained forest space.
Look Closer
- ◆The pool's surface reflects the dark tree canopy above as an almost black mirror — only small sky gaps within the trees send light into the dark water.
- ◆Figures at the pool's edge are more prominently placed than in many of Van Ruisdael's woodland pools — they provide both scale and the suggestion of narrative.
- ◆Dead timber projects from the bank into the water at the left — decaying wood a vanitas marker that Van Ruisdael uses to indicate the pool's stagnation.
- ◆Fresh green ferns and plants grow at the bank's edge — the contrast between new growth and dead wood is a consistent philosophical pattern in his forest subjects.
- ◆The light source above the pool is implied only by the bright patches in the tree canopy — the pool itself is in deep shadow.
