Landscape with a Waterfall

Jacob van Ruisdael painted dozens of thundering northern waterfalls, and he almost certainly never saw one. He spent his life in the flat, watery Netherlands. The rushing torrents and pine-covered crags came instead from another painter, Allart van Everdingen, who had actually sailed to Norway and Sweden and brought home drawings of that wilder country. Ruisdael took up the motif in the 1660s and made it thoroughly his own, and this canvas from around 1670 belongs to that long run of pictures. The water breaks over dark rocks, a patch of pale sky opens above, and the whole scene feels damp and in motion. Dutch buyers, living in a country with no mountains at all, clearly loved these glimpses of a rougher north. He produced well over a hundred of them.