A Wooded Marsh

By the 1660s the Dutch Republic was the richest trading nation in Europe, its cities crowded and its land relentlessly drained and farmed. Jacob van Ruisdael painted almost the opposite of that. This is a wild, primeval swamp — a stagnant pool choked with water-lilies, dead birches split and rotting, old oaks mirrored in the still water — a corner of nature with no people and no use in it. Ruisdael returned to scenes like this again and again in these years, and later landscape painters treated them almost as a source to borrow from. This particular marsh became the most admired of all his works in Russia. It was bought by Catherine the Great for the Hermitage, among the paintings she gathered to give her new empire the weight of old Europe.