Landscape with Travellers before an Inn near a Watering Place

1660

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 60.7 cm × width 85 cm
outersize: depth 9.3 cm (support incl. SK-L-6465)

Inscriptions

signature and date, bottom centre (S, V and R ligated): SVRuysdael / 1660

Technical notes

Support The panel consists of three horizontally grained oak planks (approx. 21, 21 and 18.7 cm), approx. 1.2 cm thick. The top edge 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 1628. The panel could have been ready for use by 1637, but a date in or after 1647 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, thin, solid yellowish-white ground extends over the edges of the support at bottom, left and right, but not over the top edge.
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 on the right in the first lay-in of the landscape and sky. All of 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 rather thin, light brown parts of the rooftops, the shadowed area of the large house and the foreground are semi-transparent, allowing the ground to show through. Lighter passages, such as the clouds and the brighter parts of the road, are thicker and thus more opaque, and show some brushmarking which is particularly pronounced in the sky where it also leaves the ground exposed locally. Extensive impasto was used to emphasize the structure of the foliage.
Ige Verslype, 2023

Scientific examination and reports

infrared photography: I. Verslype, RMA (no image available), 2008
paint samples: I. Verslype, RMA, nos. SK-A-352/1-2, 24 September 2008
technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 24 September 2008
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 18 April 2012

Condition

Good. Some small retouchings are visible throughout under UV light.

Provenance

…; sale, Prof. Jan Bleuland (1756-1838, Utrecht), Utrecht (H. van Ommeren), 6 May 1839 sqq., no. 292 (‘Paneel h. 6 p. 2 d. br. 8 p. 5 d. [62 x 85 cm], Een aan den weg gelegen Herberg waarvoor een voorgrond eenige in het water staande koeijen, verder een postwagen […]’), fl. 500;¹…; collection Johannes Rombouts (1772-1850), Dordrecht;² his nephew, Leendert Dupper Willemsz (1799-1870), Dordrecht, 1850;³ by whom bequeathed to the museum, as Frans Hals, with 63 other paintings, 12 April 1870⁴

Object number: SK-A-352

Credit line: Dupper Wzn. Bequest, Dordrecht

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.⁵ 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.⁶ 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

Salomon van Ruysdael depicted this house on several occasions, as in his 1655 Landscape with Travellers before an Inn, also in the Rijksmuseum.⁷ In this painting of five years later the vantage point is much lower, setting the ridge of the roof at more of an angle. The church with two towers but no nave in the far distance reinforces the sense of depth, which is accentuated by the trees leaning to the left. There are more trees than in the earlier scene, lending it a more intimate feel. The artist also heightened the contrasts in colour and chiaroscuro, which is typical of his style of the 1660s. The events around the inn are brightened by the shadowy hillock in the right foreground.

Van Ruysdael repeated not only buildings. A year after the present work he reused the composition of the inn with almost the same trees in The Halt, now in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin,⁸ where there is a stretch of water crossed by a plank at lower left as well. The staffage is also similar but was not adapted to match the larger size of the canvas, so is disproportionately small. The cow licking another’s head, together with the animal drinking in the foreground recur in the Rijksmuseum’s Landscape with Gypsies and Travellers of 1663.⁹

The vehicles and the dress of the figures, the women in particular, indicate that the company is more refined than that in the Rijksmuseum’s 1655 Landscape with Travellers before an Inn. The black carriage has a coat of arms on the back consisting of a chevron with three roundels crowned with a crest. It has not been associated with a particular family, nor have the clasped hands on the rear of the brown coach. Like the rest of the scene, both elements were probably dreamed up by the artist.

Richard Harmanni, 2023

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

M. Rooses, De schilderkunst van 1400 tot 1800 in Vlaanderen en Holland, Italië, Duitschland, Spanje, Frankrijk en Engeland, Amsterdam 1908, pp. 118-19; W. Martin, De Hollandsche schilderkunst in de zeventiende eeuw, II, Amsterdam 1936, pp. 280-82; W. Stechow, Salomon van Ruysdael: Eine Einführung in seine Kunst, Berlin 1975 (ed. princ. 1938), p. 92, no. 158; R. Priem, Dutch Masters from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, exh. cat. Melbourne (National Gallery of Victoria) 2005, pp. 114-15

Collection catalogues

1870, p. 242, no. XLV; 1880, pp. 267-68, no. 308; 1887, p. 146, no. 1236; 1903, p. 233, no. 2083; 1934, p. 252, no. 2083; 1976, p. 489, no. A 352

Citation

Richard Harmanni, 2023, 'Salomon van Ruysdael, Landscape with Travellers before an Inn near a Watering Place, 1660', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5343

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