Cascade dans un paysage rocheux

The Dutch Republic Ruisdael lived in was famously flat, so it is a small surprise that around 1660 he was turning out roaring mountain torrents like this one. He had never seen such country. The taste for it came secondhand, from an older painter named Allaert van Everdingen, who sailed to Norway and Sweden in 1644 and came home with sketches of crags and falling water that Dutch collectors suddenly wanted on their walls. Ruisdael built his own versions from those, piling up bare rock and foam and a few slender birches bent as if in a gale. The tall chimneys of a house half-hidden in the trees are about the only still, settled thing he lets you find.