Jacob van Ruisdael, 'A Landscape with a Ruined Castle and a Church', about 1665-70

This, one of van Ruisdael’s most famous paintings, is a much bigger version of a similar landscape by him that is also in our collection: An Extensive Landscape with Ruins. Other smaller versions also survive. We don’t know which was painted first but this sizeable picture was almost certainly painted on commission and was designed to hang in a very large room. The others were made for more modest surroundings.

The size of this painting is matched by the sense of grandeur van Ruisdael has managed to create; the vast sky is obviously important to this. It takes up about two thirds of the painting – a typical proportion in Dutch landscapes. But the way that the clouds seem to billow up towards us against a blue summery sky adds dynamism to the grandeur.

The landscape is underpinned with structural devices which help lead our eye into the painting. Closest to us, in the left foreground, stand two shepherds. They were painted by one of van Ruisdael’s contemporaries, Adriaen van der Velde, though they may well have been part of the original design. Combined with two much tinier figures on the road down towards the church, they help us understand the scale of the landscape – and tempt us to follow the winding path further, past the cottages until it disappears among the fields.

Van Ruisdael has used highlights, picked out by the sunshine which has momentarily broken through the clouds, to reinforce these devices and to add to the sense of depth. The sun illuminates not only the shepherds, but a sequence of features set at different distances from the viewer: first the castle and swans in the foreground, then the fields on the left and those which surround the windmill in the middle distance. A thin strand of blue shimmers on the horizon, suggesting the sun glinting on the distant sea. Finally, furthest from our eye, are the silvery tops of the highest of those billowing clouds.

As well as appreciating the sense of scale and depth he was able to conjure, van Ruisdael’s customers would have understood another dimension to this picture. The pastoral figures and the ruins in the foreground allude to a Italian tradition of depicting Arcadian scenes of country life among the ruins of ancient Rome. They had first been made popular a few decades earlier by Dutch artists returning from Italy. There was no expectation that these paintings represented real places; they represented an idea of a classical Italian landscape.

The same concept is true of this painting. Although it is reminiscent of the countryside around Haarlem, where van Ruisdael grew up and trained as an artist, no one has been able to identify the main church or an exact location for the panorama. Most likely it was an idealised view, evoking and reflecting ideas that he and his customers had about how Holland should look and what was important to them. The productive nature of the landscape was represented by the shepherds, the corn and the windmill; a sense of history by the ruined castle. The church – the building that dominates the horizon – stood, in their eyes, for eternal certainty.