Salomon van Ruysdael

c. 1602, Naarden, The Netherlands–1670, Haarlem, The Netherlands

River Landscape with Fishermen is an example of Dutch Golden Age painting, and Salomon van Ruysdael—although not as famous as his nephew Jacob van Ruisdael (1629/1630–1681)—was one of the great representatives of landscape painting, which in this period in Holland became a genre in its own right. Salomon van Ruysdael specialized in sea and river landscapes, as if in homage to the element of water, which played a major part in the Dutch economic boom of the era and which features in many other works in this exhibition.

Van Ruysdael is known as a “tonal” painter because he created his images using numerous tones of a few subdued colors. With landscape painting, the focus in art shifted from the life of humans to Nature. In this particular painting, the main characters are the sky and the willow trees. Humans are harmoniously inscribed into the landscape: the fishermen’s boats are hardly noticeable, their reflection dissolved in water, and the red roofs merge with nature in the hazy background. Attentive to the everchanging weather, the artist has come to a new understanding of nature, which lives according to its own laws, an understanding that a century later would be reflected in the Romantic idea of the sublime.