Jacob van Ruisdael

Jacob van Ruisdael turned the flat, damp landscape of the Dutch Republic into high drama, mostly by looking up. In his paintings two-thirds of the canvas is often sky, piled with grey weather moving over a low country of dunes, mills and church towers.

His Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede, from around 1670, sets a single great mill against towering clouds while a shaft of light catches the brick tower and the water below, a small town made monumental. He could also paint mood as meaning, as in The Jewish Cemetery, where ruined tombs, a broken tree and a rainbow become a study of time and decay.

Ruisdael came from a family of Haarlem painters and learned the craft from his uncle Salomon, a specialist in river scenes. His only documented pupil was Meindert Hobbema, who often added the small figures Ruisdael left out. Late in life, living in Amsterdam, he took a medical degree, in 1676, and appears to have worked as a surgeon alongside his painting. He died in 1682 and was buried in Haarlem, and for the next two centuries English landscape painters like Constable and Turner studied his skies closely.