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Lot Essay
This elegantly composed picture was executed in 1648, the year Jacob van Ruisdael, the greatest of all Dutch landscapists, joined the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke. Barely twenty years of age at the time of execution, here Ruisdael demonstrates his innate talent and instinctive feel for compositional harmony and poetic mood. A master at evoking light and atmosphere, Ruisdael’s ground-breaking paintings from before 1650 constitute, in the words of Peter Sutton, ‘some of his most beautiful and subtle works that had a lasting influence in the history of art’ (Old Master Paintings from the Hascoe Collection, exhibition catalogue, Greenwich, CT, 2005, under no. 8).
In these early years, Ruisdael took particular inspiration from the countryside in and around his native Haarlem. These rustic views of tumbledown cottages along a diagonally oriented dirt path in the dunes around Haarlem poetically capture a sense of harmony between man and nature. A handful of solitary figures rest or go about the day’s activities, their presence dwarfed by one or more majestic trees whose canopy pierces an atmospheric, cloud-filled sky. The composition of this painting is notably similar to that of Ruisdael’s Wooded landscape with a man and two dogs on a path, a cottage beyond, a panel of similar scale dated to the same year that sold in these Rooms on 7 July 2022 for a world auction record of £3,382,500.
Though unknown to Slive, this painting was probably the last of three landscapes by Ruisdael that belonged to the banker Baron François-Benjamin-Marie Delessert and featured in his 1869 estate sale. These include another dune scene, likewise datable to the 1640s, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Slive, op. cit., no. 613) and a waterfall formerly in the collection of George Spencer Spitz in Vienna that last sold at Christie’s, New York, 27 April 2017, lot 154 (ibid., no. 290). Delessert possessed an extraordinary collection of paintings, augmented in no small part by works owned by his elder brother and fellow banker, Jules-Paul-Benjamin Delessert (1773-1847). Among the highlights of the Delessert collection were Raphael’s Orléans Madonna (Chantilly, Musée Condé), Pieter de Hooch’s The Visit (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and a large-scale Fish market by David Teniers the Younger, each of which fetched the extraordinary price of 100,000 francs or more at his estate sale.
In these early years, Ruisdael took particular inspiration from the countryside in and around his native Haarlem. These rustic views of tumbledown cottages along a diagonally oriented dirt path in the dunes around Haarlem poetically capture a sense of harmony between man and nature. A handful of solitary figures rest or go about the day’s activities, their presence dwarfed by one or more majestic trees whose canopy pierces an atmospheric, cloud-filled sky. The composition of this painting is notably similar to that of Ruisdael’s Wooded landscape with a man and two dogs on a path, a cottage beyond, a panel of similar scale dated to the same year that sold in these Rooms on 7 July 2022 for a world auction record of £3,382,500.
Though unknown to Slive, this painting was probably the last of three landscapes by Ruisdael that belonged to the banker Baron François-Benjamin-Marie Delessert and featured in his 1869 estate sale. These include another dune scene, likewise datable to the 1640s, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Slive, op. cit., no. 613) and a waterfall formerly in the collection of George Spencer Spitz in Vienna that last sold at Christie’s, New York, 27 April 2017, lot 154 (ibid., no. 290). Delessert possessed an extraordinary collection of paintings, augmented in no small part by works owned by his elder brother and fellow banker, Jules-Paul-Benjamin Delessert (1773-1847). Among the highlights of the Delessert collection were Raphael’s Orléans Madonna (Chantilly, Musée Condé), Pieter de Hooch’s The Visit (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and a large-scale Fish market by David Teniers the Younger, each of which fetched the extraordinary price of 100,000 francs or more at his estate sale.