Landschaft mit Wasserfall

Ruisdael never set foot in Scandinavia, yet he painted its churning waterfalls more than 150 times. The subject reached Holland through a fellow Haarlem painter, Allart van Everdingen, who had sailed north to Norway and Sweden in the 1640s and brought its firs, boulders and rushing torrents home with him. Ruisdael took the motif and made it his own, working it up in the studio around 1668 from other men's images rather than any river he had seen. Here the water breaks white over dark rock, a fallen tree leans across the foreground, and a small building perches on the ridge above. Dutch collectors lived in a flat country with almost no hills and no fast water, and it was exactly these wild northern places, none of which Ruisdael had visited, that they bought.