Jacob van Ruisdael, 'A Cottage and a Hayrick by a River', about 1646-50

This is an early work by Jacob van Ruisdael, probably made when he was only about 20 years old, around the time that he qualified as an artist and joined the painters’ guild in his home town of Haarlem. It seems to have been influenced by the style of his uncle, Salomon van Ruysdael, who may have been one of his teachers.

Salomon painted many river and estuary scenes, taking a ‘naturalistic’ approach in which he didn’t necessarily paint a real view, but composed pictures evocative of the everyday waterways and woodlands typical of the landscape around Haarlem. The effects of cloud building in a big sky and of reflections in water were central to his work, and he often used a fairly restricted range of colours, mainly blues, greens and greys. There’s a good example of this style in the National Gallery’s collection: River Scene.

In the painting we see here, van Ruisdael has taken a similar approach. Instead of a long sweeping view of the countryside, he has built the composition around a narrow focus: a stand of scrubby trees and a farmhouse on the edge of a river. And he has made it all the more artistically challenging by choosing a backlit scene. While this increases the visual impact of the trees against a bright sky, it required him to evoke the effects of light filtering through the leaves and the glare of the sun on the surface of the river.

If you look closely at the brushwork, you can see the techniques van Ruisdael used to create a convincing effect. He paid particular attention to the depiction of the trees in the centre of the picture, building up an impression of the myriad colours of the leaves with thousands of tiny dabs and smudges of different greens, browns and yellows, as well as a few tiny flecks of white. Beneath the canopy are the blue-greens of a willow pollard, the white flowers of an elder in bloom and the spiky light-green leaves of the reeds growing against the river bank.

By contrast, he established the blues of the sky with regular horizontal brushstrokes, and built up the greys and whites of the clouds by using thicker paint and smudging the colours together. For the glassy reflections in the water he used more even paint layers, suggesting the ripples with short lateral streaks of light grey, and picking out the glitter on the surface with delicate spatters of bright white. The cottage and covered hayrick –after which the painting was later named – are by contrast much more sketchily painted.

There is another version of this painting in the Detroit Institute of Arts, and a chalk drawing by van Ruisdael of a similar composition was sold at auction in 1956 (location unknown). There are records from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of a companion piece to this picture, ‘A Cornfield’, which has not been identified.