The Thicket

Ruisdael never called this picture The Thicket. The French title, Le Buisson, first appears in 1844, in the writing of the critic Théophile Thoré, just as the Barbizon painters, French landscapists working in the forest of Fontainebleau, were making their name. The picture became a favourite of that generation. The painter Charles-François Daubigny engraved it in 1855, the historian Jules Michelet wrote about it, and Vincent van Gogh admired it at the Louvre. Ruisdael painted it in Haarlem around 1649 or 1650, when he was barely 20. The view is from the dunes, on a sandy track probably running from Bloemendaal to Overveen, with Haarlem low on the horizon at the left. The big trees are most likely alders, common in those dunes, rather than oaks. A man walks up the track with his dogs.