Object data
oil on panel
support: height 56.2 cm × width 83.8 cm
outersize: depth 7.5 cm (support incl. SK-L-6127)
Salomon van Ruysdael
Landscape with Travellers before an Inn
1655
Inscriptions
- signature and date, lower centre, on the coach (V and R ligated): S·VR / 1655
Technical notes
Support The panel consists of two horizontally grained oak planks (approx. 30.6 and 25.6 cm), approx. 1 cm thick. The top has been trimmed slightly. The reverse is bevelled on the left and right, and has regularly spaced saw marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1637. The panel could have been ready for use by 1648, but a date in or after 1654 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, off-white ground extends over the edges of the support at the bottom and on the left and right, but not over the top edge. It contains some small earth pigments and a very small addition of white and umber-coloured pigment.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. General reserves were left for the houses in the first lay-in of the landscape and sky. The figures and animals were executed over the background with quite bright, sketchy but efficiently placed small, fluid brushstrokes, giving them (especially the animals) a somewhat cartoonish look. The paint layers are rather thin with visible brushmarking throughout, leaving the ground locally exposed in the sky or showing through, for instance, in the semi-transparent brown areas of the rooftops and the foreground. Lighter passages, such as the clouds, the houses on the left and the brighter parts of the road, are thicker and thus more opaque. Extensive impasto was used to emphasize the structure of the foliage.
Ige Verslype, 2023
Scientific examination and reports
- infrared photography: I. Verslype, RMA, 2008
- paint samples: I. Verslype, RMA, nos. SK-A-713/1-2, 24 September 2008
- technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 24 September 2008
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 28 December 2011
Condition
Good. Small paint losses are visible at the edges of the panel. Residues of an old varnish can be discerned in the interstices of the paint surface. The varnish has yellowed.
Provenance
…; sale, Hendrik Muilman (1743-1812, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 12 April 1813 sqq., no. 136 (‘Hoog 22, breed 30 duimen [57.2 x 78 cm]. Paneel. Een Dorpsgezigt, gestoffeerd met een Postwagen en Reizigers te paard, op den voorgrond een Herder, welke eenige Koeijen voortdrijft […].’), bought in at fl. 70 (last bidder Jeronimo de Vries);1 his son, Willem Ferdinand Mogge Muilman (1778-1849), Amsterdam; his daughter, Anna Maria van de Poll-Mogge Muilman (1811-1878), Amsterdam; her stepson, Jacobus Salomon Hendrik van de Poll (1837-1880), Amsterdam; by whom bequeathed to the museum, with 49 other paintings, 2 July 18802
Object number: SK-A-713
Credit line: Jonkheer J.S.H. van de Poll Bequest, Amsterdam
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Salomon van Ruysdael (Naarden 1600/03 - Haarlem 1670)
Salomon van Ruysdael was born in Naarden, presumably between 1600 and 1603, because when he enrolled as a master in Haarlem’s Guild of St Luke in 1623 he must have been at least 20 years old. He was a son, probably the youngest one, of the prosperous Mennonite cabinetmaker Jacob Jansz de Gooyer. After the latter’s death in 1616 the artist and his brothers adopted the surname derived from the Ruysdael or Ruisschendael country estate near Blaricum, where their father had been born.
Van Ruysdael settled in Haarlem, and is first mentioned in the St Luke archives there in 1623, when he presented the guild with a landscape he had painted. Shortly before 1627 he married Maycke Willemsdr Buyse, the daughter of a wealthy Mennonite bleacher, and it was through her family that he became involved in that trade, dealing in the blue agent used in the city’s famous bleacheries. That explains why he also became a member of the local drapers’ guild in 1658. By 1657 he also owned a share in a tanning mill in Gorinchem, a town east of Rotterdam. As a Mennonite he was not allowed to bear arms, so each year he had to buy off his obligations to the Haarlem civic guard.
Van Ruysdael’s earliest known paintings are from 1626: The Valkenburg Horse Fair and Dune Landscape with a Horseman Riding a Grey.3 In 1628 Samuel Ampzing praised both him and Gerrit Bleker as landscapists in his Beschryvinge of Haarlem. His work started appearing on the market as early as 17 November 1631, when two of his pictures were sold from the collection of Hendrick Willemsz den Apt, the landlord of the Coningh van Vranckrijck inn. Van Ruysdael took an active part in organizing lotteries and sales in Haarlem, and in 1642 he vainly tried to persuade the authorities not to ban auctions of paintings.
On 6 October 1637 Van Ruysdael paid St Luke’s for an apprenticeship for Hendrik Pietersz de Hondt (dates unknown). Cornelis Decker (1618-1678) is mentioned as a pupil in 1649, and others whom he taught were his son Jacob (1629/30-1681) and his nephew Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael (1628/29-1682). He served the guild as warden in 1647, 1663-64 and 1669-70, and as dean in 1648. Van Ruysdael’s last dated works are from 1669: Winter Landscape with Skaters and View of Alkmaar with a Maypole.4 He was buried in the high choir of the Grote Kerk in Haarlem on 3 November 1670. Although he was reasonably well-off, his finances had suffered in a recession.
His oeuvre consists largely of landscapes, many with views of rivers and some featuring an inn, as well as a number of seascapes and winter scenes. He also began painting still lifes in 1659.
Richard Harmanni, 2023
References
S. Ampzing, Beschryvinge ende lof der stad Haerlem in Holland, Haarlem 1628 (reprint Amsterdam 1974), p. 372; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, III, Amsterdam 1721, p. 66; J. Immerzeel Jr, De levens en werken der Hollandsche en Vlaamsche kunstschilders, beeldhouwers, graveurs en bouwmeesters: Van het begin der vijftiende eeuw tot heden, II, Amsterdam 1843, p. 41; A. van der Willigen, Geschiedkundige aanteekeningen over Haarlemsche schilders en andere beoefenaren van de beeldende kunsten, voorafgegaan door eene korte geschiedenis van het schilders- of St. Lucas Gild aldaar, Haarlem 1866, pp. 183-84; A. van der Willigen, Les artistes de Harlem: Notices historiques avec un précis sur la Gilde de St. Luc, Haarlem/The Hague 1870, pp. 254-55; P. Scheltema, Aemstel’s oudheid of gedenkwaardigheden van Amsterdam, VI, Amsterdam 1872, pp. 99-100; H.F. Wijnman, ‘Het leven der Ruysdaels’, Oud Holland 49 (1932), pp. 49-60, 173-81, 258-75, esp. pp. 52, 56, 272-73; Simon in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXIX, Leipzig 1935, pp. 189-90; W. Stechow, Salomon van Ruysdael: Eine Einführung in seine Kunst, Berlin 1975 (ed. princ. 1938), pp. 11-14; H. Miedema, De archiefbescheiden van het St. Lucasgilde te Haarlem, 1497-1798, 2 vols., Alphen aan den Rijn 1980; I. van Thiel-Stroman, ‘Biographies 15th-17th Century’, in P. Biesboer et al., Painting in Haarlem 1500-1850: The Collection of the Frans Hals Museum, coll. cat. Haarlem 2006, pp. 99-363, esp. pp. 289-90; Van der Molen in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, C, Munich/Leipzig 2018, pp. 203-04
Entry
Scenes set around an inn were popular in seventeenth-century Dutch art, and the many depictions by Salomon van Ruysdael were a reason for Stechow to treat them as a separate group. The 30 works bearing the year of execution cover an extensive period, ranging from 16355 to 1665 or 1666.6 Stechow also identified 11 undated ones.
Gathered outside an inn in this 1655 painting are four riders, one of whom is blowing a trumpet decked with an orange banner. Standing a little further to the left is a black coach with the horse eating from a feeding trough. Van Ruysdael made five almost literal or very similar repetitions of this picturesque scene from the same vantage point, including the Rijksmuseum’s Landscape with Travellers before an Inn near a Watering Place of five years later.7 A no longer traceable work dated 1645 with a farmhouse and a wooden shed is the closest in composition to the present panel.8 In a variant in The Norton Simon Foundation in Los Angeles the centre background is dominated by a large stand of trees.9 The other two pictures are in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin and the LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn.10
Compared to Van Ruysdael’s later painting of the subject in the Rijksmuseum,11 there is still an abundance of brown and grey tints in the present panel. The most colourful passage is the group of horsemen in front of the inn. The dark part of the hill in the right foreground makes the sandy road beyond it look brighter, but otherwise there are few contrasts between light and shade, and there are very few shadows around the staffage. In this respect the palette and chiaroscuro are closer to Van Ruysdael’s works of the 1640s than to the 1660 Landscape with Travellers before an Inn near a Watering Place.
Richard Harmanni, 2023
See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements
Literature
W. Stechow, Salomon van Ruysdael: Eine Einführung in seine Kunst, Berlin 1975 (ed. princ. 1938), p. 91, no. 155
Collection catalogues
1881, p. 69, no. 308a; 1887, p. 146, no. 1237; 1903, p. 233, no. 2084; 1934, p. 252, no. 2084a; 1976, p. 489, no. A 713
Citation
Richard Harmanni, 2023, 'Salomon van Ruysdael, Landscape with Travellers before an Inn, 1655', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5342
(accessed 22 November 2024 15:28:47).