Jacob van Ruisdael (Haarlem 1628/9-1682 Amsterdam)

Jacob van Ruisdael’s reputation as the most talented and versatile landscape artist of the Golden Age has endured since the seventeenth century. Early in his career, in the 1650s, he travelled to the borderlands between the Netherlands and Germany, in Gelderland, Overijssel and Westphalia, where he encountered the particular types of water mills he would go on to incorporate in his landscapes. His pictures of these mills constitute a relatively small but important group in his oeuvre, which Seymour Slive dates to the 1650s; on only one such work is the date fully legible, Two Water Mills with an Open Sluice, of ‘1653’ (Los Angeles, Getty Museum).

This well-preserved panel is the smallest of the group listed by Slive, with a slightly larger variant listed as formerly in Cassel, E. Habich (Slive, op. cit., 2001, p. 133, no. 112), and a drawing related to both pictures held in the Rijksprentkabinet, Amsterdam. It is unclear whether the mills he painted were faithful representations of known sites, or more liberally invented ideas of idyllic countryside. In this instance, however, the mills have been tentatively identified as those at Singraven, near Denekamp, which Ruisdael’s pupil, Meindert Hobbema, would go on to paint, one example of which is in the National Gallery, London. While Hobbema made the painting of water mills his speciality, it was Ruisdael who pioneered the subject, practising the genre a decade before his pupil, and his impact on Hobbema can be eminently felt in this eloquent landscape.