Panoramic View of Amsterdam, Looking towards the IJ

Amsterdam, c. 1665

Object data

black chalk, with grey wash (possibly by a later hand); framing line in brown ink (partially trimmed)

height 85 mm × width 150 mm

Inscriptions

stamped: lower right, with the mark of August II (L. 971)
inscribed on verso: centre, in a seventeenth-century hand, in graphite, getekent van t dack der Verbrande Niwe Kerk / tot Amsterdam naer ’t IJ; below that, in pencil, 3541; next to that, in pencil, Ruysdael; lower left, in a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century hand, in graphite, J Ruisdael; lower right, in pencil, 56 u
stamped on verso: lower right, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228)

Technical notes

Watermark: Fragment of a foolscap

Condition

Light foxing along the left and right edges of the sheet; slight abrasions in the washes at the upper edge

Provenance

...; anonymous sale, Amsterdam (H. de Winter and J. Yver), 12 February 1770 sqq., Album D, no. 283 (‘Een Gezicht van het Dorp Ouderkerk aan den Amstel en een Gezicht ziende van het verbrande Dak van de Nieuwe Kerk te Amsterdam over de Stad, getekend in de manier als de voorgaande, [met zwart Kryd, door J. Ruisdael]’); …; sale, Hendrik Busserus (1701-81, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 21 October 1782 sqq., Album 32, no. 2192 (‘Twee stuks, de Luthersche Nieuwe Kerk, en een gezicht over de Stad Amsterdam, met zwart Kryt, door J. Ruysdaal’), with one other drawing, fl. 4:10:- for both, to ‘IJver’;¹ …; anonymous sale, Amsterdam (J. Roos), 11 March 1789 sqq., Album 2, no. 28 (‘Amsterdam van het verbrande Dak der Nieuwe Kerk af te zien, door J. Ruisdaal’); …; collection Friedrich August II, King of Saxony (1797-1854), Dresden (L. 971); his wife, Maria Anna Leopoldine Elisabeth Wilhelmine, Princess of Bavaria (1805-77), Dresden; her nephew, Georg, King of Saxony (1832-1904), Dresden; his son, Johann Georg, Prince of Saxony (1869-1938), Dresden and Altshausen, near Ravensburg;² …; collection Wilhelmus Josephus Rudolphus Dreesmann (1885-1954), Amsterdam, by 1951;³ his sale, Amsterdam (B.F.M. Mensing), 22 March 1960 sqq., no. 24, fl. 17,360, to the museum (L. 2228)

Object number: RP-T-1960-116

The artist

Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael (Haarlem 1628/29 - Amsterdam 1682)

He was the only son of the Mennonite framemaker, art dealer and landscape painter Isaack Jacobsz Ruisdael (1599-1677). As stated in Jacob’s will of 27 May 1667, he was born in Haarlem. A notarized document of 9 June 1661, in which he declares himself to be thirty-two years old, puts his birthdate at 1628 or 1629. Although there is no documentary evidence, it is likely that Jacob trained with his father and, possibly, with his uncle Salomon van Ruysdael (c. 1600/03-1670). Be that as it may, the refined landscapes of Cornelis Hendriksz Vroom (c. 1590/92-1661) had a far more profound impact on Jacob’s early work, the earliest dated examples of which are from 1646. According to the records of the Haarlem painters’ guild, Jacob was enrolled in 1648. Houbraken claimed that Jacob also practiced medicine. In fact, a ‘Jacobus Ruijsdael’ appears on a list of Amsterdam doctors in the Amsterdam Stadsarchief, stating that a medical degree was conferred on him at the university of Caen, northern France, on 15 October 1676. This, however, is unlikely to be the artist. Houbraken was probably correct when he wrote that Nicolaes Berchem (1621/22-1683) and Ruisdael were good friends. It is generally assumed they travelled together to Bentheim in Westphalia just across the border around 1650. It is likely that Ruisdael settled in Amsterdam circa 1655, when Meindert Hobbema (1638-1709) became his pupil there, according to a notarized document of 8 July 1660. A Mennonite just like his father, Jacob had himself baptized on 17 June 1657 in Ankeveen, a village near Utrecht. At this time he was living in Amsterdam in a house called ‘In de Silvere Trompete’ on the Rokin from the Dam to the Kromme Elleboogsteeg. On 15 January 1659, Jacob became a citizen of Amsterdam. When the artist drew up his will in 1667, he was living on the Kalverstraat, but from 1670 he was a subtenant of the third house on the south side of the Dam, seen from the Rokin, living above the book and art shop ‘De Wackeren Hond’, owned by the publisher Hieronymus Sweerts (1629-1696). Members of the wealthy Amsterdam patrician family De Graeff were clients of Jacob, as is attested by various archival sources. The Arrival of Cornelis de Graeff and his Family at his Country Estate Soestdijk, in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (inv. no. NGI.287),⁴ which was painted in collaboration with Thomas de Keyser (1596-1667), for instance, was certainly one such commission. Although Ruisdael’s paintings were given modest valuations in the few inventories made during his lifetime, his financial situation seems to have been stable enough throughout his career for him to be able, for instance in 1678, to lend 400 guilders to the Amsterdam doctor Johannes Baptist van Lamsweerde (active 1677-78). In 1674, Jacob’s assets were estimated, for tax purposes, at 2,000 guilders. He died a lifelong bachelor in 1682 and was buried on 14 March in the Grote Kerk, Haarlem, the city to which he presumably had returned shortly before his death.

Ruisdael left an impressive oeuvre of some 800 paintings, around 140 drawings and a tiny corpus of 13 etchings. Dated works are rather unevenly distributed over his career, creating uncertainty over his precise development. His last five dated paintings are from the 1660s, but in every case the last digit is illegible. Ruisdael was, no doubt, the most versatile landscapist of the Dutch Golden Age. His oeuvre includes city- and seascapes, coastal and panoramic scenes, wooded and winter landscapes, grain fields, Scandinavian landscapes and landscape views centring on an array of motifs such as hills, mountains, bridges, ruined structures, water and wind mills, cemeteries, castles, cottages, sluices, torrents and waterfalls. Ruisdael frequently employed colleagues to add staffage to his landscape views, among them Berchem, Johannes Lingelbach (1622-1674), Gerrit Lundens (1622-1686), Adriaen van de Velde (1636-1672) and Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668). Besides Vroom, the only other artist who exerted a recognizable and sustained influence over Ruisdael was Allaert van Everdingen (1621-1675). In turn, Ruisdael himself had a decisive impact on a host of landscape specialists, including Hobbema, Roelof Jansz van Vries (c. 1630/31-after 1681), Cornelis Gerritsz Decker (?-1678), Klaes Molenaer (c. 1626/29-1676) and Jan van Kessel (1641-1680), to mention just a few.

Eddy Schavemaker, 2019

References
A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, 3 vols., Amsterdam 1718-21, III (1721), pp. 65-66; H.F. Wijnman, ‘Het leven der Ruysdaels’, Oud Holland 49 (1932), pp. 49-60; K.E. Simon, ‘Jacob Isaackzoon van Ruisdael’, in U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, XXIX (1935), pp. 190-93; F.W.H. Hollstein et al., Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, c. 1450-1700, 72 vols., Amsterdam and elsewhere 1947-2010, XX (1978); J. Giltaij, ‘De tekeningen van Jacob van Ruisdael’, Oud Holland 94 (1980), nos. 2/3, pp. 141-208; S. Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, Drawings and Etchings, New Haven 2001, with earlier literature; I. van Thiel-Stroman, ‘Biographies 15th-17th century’, in P.N. Köhler (ed.), Painting in Haarlem 1500-1850: The Collection of the Frans Hals Museum, coll. cat. Haarlem 2006, pp. 281-86; J.P. Hinrichs, ‘Nogmaals over een oud raadsel. Jacob van Ruisdael, Arnold Houbraken en de Amsterdamse naamlijst van geneesheren’, Oud Holland 126 (2013), no. 1, pp. 58-62; T. van der Molen, ‘Ruisdael, Jacob van’, in A. Beyer et al. (eds.), Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, Munich 1992-, C (2018), p. 116

Entry

This panoramic view – seen from scaffolding in the foreground – enables the spectator to look northwards over the city of Amsterdam, with its crowded harbour, towards the IJ in the distance. The following landmarks can be recognized: on the right is the tall spire of the Oude Kerk (Old Church), with the Montelbaanstoren (Montelbaan Tower) just to the right to it. At far left is the Haringpakkerstoren (Herring Packer’s Tower). At right, below and to the left of the Oude Kerk, a continuous row of gabled houses can be seen along the Damrak.

An old inscription on the verso suggests that Ruisdael’s vantage was from the burnt roof of the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church), which was badly damaged by a fire in January 1645; the sheet was thus long believed to have been sketched between 1645 and 1647, the period during which scaffolding was put up for the repair of the church tower (and before another fire on 10 May 1648 further damaged the church).⁵ However, the accuracy of the inscription has often been doubted, and even those scholars who accept its veracity agree that the handling of the sheet implies a later date: Bakker opted in favour of circa 1650,⁶ while Giltaij assigned the drawing to the early 1650s. Rosenberg, however, had already argued that Ruisdael was instead standing on scaffolding erected in connection with the construction in 1664 or 1665 of the dome of the adjacent new Town Hall. This led Frerichs to date the drawing to the mid-1660s,⁷ a conclusion that is consistent, according to Slive, with its style and conception. If this were indeed the viewpoint, however, it remains a mystery why no elements of the Nieuwe Kerk can be seen in the foreground.

The small scale of the sheet might also indicate that it was once part of a now lost sketchbook, one that may have included the museum’s Landscape with a View of Haarlem (inv. no. RP-T-1961-43), which is datable to the late 1660s or early 1670s.⁸

Also arguing in favour of a later date for the present work is the fact that Ruisdael used this small, rectangular drawing as a preparatory study for a painting in an English private collection, now on loan to the National Gallery, London (inv. no. L. 1052).⁹ The painting, datable circa 1665-1670, is square in format, with a typical Dutch cloudy sky dominating the upper two-thirds of the composition. The artist carefully transferred the topographical details of the drawing, including the boats moored along the Damrak, though he altered the elements of the scaffolding repoussoir in the foreground.

In Giltaij’s pioneering article on the drawings of Ruisdael, he identified a group of drawings of mainly cityscapes (e.g. Amsterdam, Haarlem and Naarden), executed in the same style, mostly in black chalk. Some of these may have had grey washes added by a later hand, which might be true of the clouds in the sky here and in the shadows, especially in the repoussoir scaffolding. However, such an assumption remains speculative, since in some cases Ruisdael did apply his own washes. The difference between his own and a later hand is often difficult to discern.

Ingrid Oud, 2000/Lukas Nonner, 2019

Literature

J. Rosenberg, Jacob van Ruisdael, Berlin 1928, no. Z20 (c. 1665); Kaarten, profielen en panorama’s van Amsterdam, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Museum Fodor) 1932, no. 35; K.E. Simon, ‘Review of G. Broulhiet, Meindert Hobbema, Paris, 1938’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 9 (1940), p. 210 (not by Ruisdael, copy by another hand, after the Marquess of Lansdowne’s painting); J.Q. van Regteren Altena, ‘Het gelaat van de stad’, in A.E. d’Ailly (ed.), Zeven Eeuwen Amsterdam, 6 vols., Amsterdam s.a., III (s.a.), pp. 306-07 (fig. 212); Jaarverslag van het Rijksmuseum 3 (1951), p. 770; Verzameling Amsterdam. W.J.R. Dreesmann, 3 vols., Amsterdam 1942-51, III (1951), p. 770; C. van Hasselt, Landschaptekeningen van Hollandse meesters uit de XVIIe eeuw uit de particuliere verzameling bewaard in het Institut Néerlandais te Parijs, 2 vols., exh. cat. Brussels (Koninklijke Bibliotheek Albert I)/Rotterdam (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen)/Paris (Institut Néerlandais)/Berne (Kunstmuseum) 1968-69, I, p. 128, under no. 125 (n. 2); C. van Lakerveld (ed.), Opkomst en bloei van het Noordnederlandse stadsgezicht in de 17de eeuw/The Dutch Cityscape in the 17th Century and its Sources, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Amsterdams Historisch Museum)/Toronto (Art Gallery of Ontario) 1977, no. 77 (c. 1650); J. Giltaij, ‘De tekeningen van Jacob van Ruisdael’, Oud Holland 94 (1980), nos. 2/3, pp. 141-208, no. 3; S. Slive et al., Jacob van Ruisdael, exh. cat. The Hague (Mauritshuis)/Cambridge (MA) (Fogg Art Museum) 1981-82, no. 87; J.F. Heijbroek, Amsterdam van binnen en van buiten, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet) 1985-86, no. 31 (c. 1650); E.J. Walford, Jacob van Ruisdael and the Perception of Landscape, New Haven 1991, pp. 163, 165 (fig. 166); E. Haverkamp-Begemann, ‘Jacob van Ruisdael’s Interest in Construction’, in C.P. Schneider et al. (eds.), Shop Talk: Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive: Presented on his Seventy-fifth Birthday, Cambridge (MA) 1995, pp. 98-99 (n. 15); S. Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, Drawings and Etchings, New Haven 2001, no. D1; S. Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape, exh. cat. Los Angeles (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)/Philadelphia (Philadelphia Museum of Art)/London (Royal Academy of Art) 2005-06, no. 94; A. van Suchtelen et al., Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age, exh. cat. The Hague (Mauritshuis)/Washington (National Gallery of Art) 2008-09, p. 160 (fig. 36.1); G. Luijten et al., Drawings for Paintings in the Age of Rembrandt, exh. cat. Washington (DC) (National Gallery of Art)/Paris (Fondation Custodia) 2016-17, p. 225 (fig. 99)

Citation

I. Oud, 2000/L. Nonner, 2019, 'Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael, Panoramic View of Amsterdam, Looking towards the IJ, Amsterdam, c. 1665', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.59801

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