Jacob van Ruisdael, 'A Ruined Castle Gateway', about 1650-5

Jacob van Ruisdael was the foremost seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painter, and was very productive and highly successful – there are about 20 of his pictures in the National Gallery alone. He paved the way for Thomas Gainsborough’s rural scenes painted in England in the eighteenth century. Gainsborough admired and made copies of van Ruisdael’s work, and owned three of his pictures. But rather than the idyllic pastoral views that appealed to Gainsborough, here van Ruisdael’s vision is of a more unruly, turbulent landscape.

Van Ruisdael’s familiar wind-tossed clouds are missing – these ones pass lazily over the landscape casting shadows, the soft greys not remotely threatening. Yet there’s something bleak and faintly melancholy about the picture. The ruins are close to us instead of safely in the distance, as they are in some of his other pictures, for instance, A Landscape with a Ruined Building or A Landscape with a Ruined Castle and a Church. The paint of the sky is thinly applied, the spiky trees achieved with a flickering brush but the layers of crumbling plaster and brickwork appear thicker, quickly and roughly painted with an almost impressionistic feel. Yet van Ruisdael has portrayed some architectural detail realistically. The ribs of the vaulted ceiling are almost tangible, where they curve upwards and fan out from the columns against the inner wall and, abruptly cut off, disappear into space.

We are invited through the archway, and yet there’s a warning. The dog appears unwilling to follow its owner into the ruin. The little girl holding the man’s hand looks up, as if enquiring why they are going into this eerie place and who is the shadowy figure on the inside. Van Ruisdael is showing us a ruin in a landscape, but he is also creating a mood and appealing to our imagination.

There is a drawing by Jan van de Velde, a Dutch printmaker and contemporary of van Ruisdael, of the ruins of the castle of Huis der Kleef just outside Haarlem (now in the Teylers Museum, Haarlem). The castle was destroyed by the Spanish in 1573, during the war in which the Dutch fought for their independence from Spain. This drawing would suggest that the castle in van Ruisdael’s painting is the same building shown from a different viewpoint. But for many years the painting was known as ‘van Ruisdael’s Gate’ or ‘van Ruisdael’s Arch’, perhaps suggesting that it was more likely to be an imaginary building than a real one.