Full Description
This book examines Jacob van Ruisdael's treatment of five subjects—dunes, grainfields, ruins, rushing water, and woodlands—that recur throughout his career. The paintings, though fictive, show close attention to the complexities of particular environments that can be fruitfully considered "ecological." The pattern of Ruisdael's reworking each environment and associated phenomena shows him as laboring over these themes. His work across media conveys something of his demanding and methodical procedure as he sought to achieve pictorially the force, temporality, vitality, and motion of nature. Ruisdael's paintings decenter humankind within familiar yet reimagined landscapes. His ability to depict nature's dynamism provided an alternative vision at a foundational moment when landscape, increasingly manipulated and controlled, was most often considered property and investment. His focus on the techniques and processes of his own work to render these entities was essential to his ecological perspective and invites a similar recognition from an attentive viewer.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
I Dunes: Man in Nature
Dune Landscapes and Pleasant Places
'Duinen en Wildernissen'
Dunes and Country Roads
The Dune Environment
II Grainfields: Making Landscape
Techn.: Labor and Landscape
The Wild and the Sown
Processes of Art: Processes of Nature
Point of View
III Ruins: Temporality and Transformation
Things Fall Apart: Broken Bridges
Monumental Ruins
Biological Time
Destruction and Reconstruction
IV Water: Matter in Motion
Mills and Millruns
Ocean
Waterfalls
V Woodlands and Marshes: Art and Nature
Woodlands
Realizing Vital Form
Sylva
Landscapes Tame and Wild
Conclusion
Index
