A dune landscape with a distant view of Haarlem

Ruisdael here presents us with a view southwards towards Haarlem, as we can conclude from the position of the St. Bavo Church on the far side of the bank of the river Spaarne. The surroundings of Haarlem were famous and the beauty of the woods, dunes and lakes were praised by Karel van Mander in his Schilderboeck of 1604. He recommended artists to visit the area for inspiration and the study of nature. Although the present painting was previously listed as a doubted work by Seymour Slive in his monograph on Ruisdael (Slive, loc. cit.), Slive only had access to an old black and white photograph and a subsequent cleaning has revealed the true qualities of the brushstrokes, particularly in the depiction of the foliage and the rendering of the trees and plants. The landscape is fully signed and dated 1652 and the compositional pattern can be found in other dated works by Ruisdael of 1651-2, like the monumental The Great Oak in Los Angeles County Museum (ibid, cat. no. 380).

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