El cementerio judío

The tombs in the foreground are real. They stand in Beth Haim, the burial ground of Amsterdam's Portuguese Jewish community at Ouderkerk, and Ruisdael drew them on the spot in the 1650s. Almost everything else he invented. There was no ruined church on that flat ground, no castle, no rushing stream, no dead trees leaning over the graves. He added them to turn a real place into a meditation on how all earthly things pass away. A rainbow arches over the wreckage, the single note of hope. Water runs past the marble tombs of people whose names, carved deep in stone, were meant to outlast them.