Waterfall with a Half-Timbered House and Castle

Jacob van Ruisdael was the most innovative and versatile Dutch landscapist of the seventeenth century. In the 1660s, he painted a number of vertically oriented landscapes with waterfalls that evoke a Scandinavian wilderness. Although Dutch merchants acquired raw materials — timber for shipbuilding and iron ore for munitions — from Norway and Sweden, to most residents of the Low Countries the terrain depicted here must have looked strange and forbidding. Ruisdael never visited Scandinavia, but invented these views based on his knowledge of works by Allart van Everdingen, an artist who had traveled in Sweden and Norway in 1644 and made a career of depicting Nordic scenery.