Halt at an inn before a village with cattle watering

Signed and dated lower right: SV RvysDAEL/ 1660 (the first two letters ligated)

Panel: 21 ¾ x 29 3/8 in / 55.3 x 74.6 cm

Provenance:

By descent in a UK private collection since circa 1840

Salomon van Ruysdael was one of the pioneers of naturalistic Dutch landscape painting and specifically an originator of ‘tonalist’ painting. The present work is a superior example and a relatively late work by the master, executed at the beginning of the last decade of his career. It is also an important new addition to Ruysdael’s oeuvre since it evidently was not known to the author of the standard monograph on the artist, Wolfgang Stechow (Salomon van Ruysdael eine Einführung in seine Kunst mit kritischem Katalog der Gemälde, Berlin 1938/75). It remained out of public view in the same family’s private collection from c.1840 to 2006. However it is an entirely characteristic painting by Salomon, who addressed the subject of a halt before the inn with travellers in a landscape at least 38 times in his career, in paintings dated from 1631 to 1667 (see Stechow 1938/75, cat. nos. 145-176). These works were especially effective in evoking the Dutch countryside under the atmosphere of a spring day, seemingly following a refreshing shower. An elegant coach, a covered wagon, and a haywain stop to refresh their horses before the inn, while to the right a group of travellers, including an elegantly dressed couple, gather around a gypsy fortune-teller. Other gypsies also appear seated on the ground and walking with their children. The graceful trees display early spring growth and a church steeple rises into the windswept sky at the far right.

The artist was born Salomon Jacobsz. de Gooyer in Naarden in Gooiland but adopted the name Ruysdael from Castle Ruisdael (or Ruisschendaal) near his father’s home town. He and his brother both were artists, as was his uncle and famous nephew, the landscapist Jacob van Ruisdael (c.1628/29-1682). His teacher is unknown but his early works closely resemble those of Esaias van de Velde (1587-1630). Salomon entered the painters’ guild in Haarlem in 1623 and dated his first paintings three years later. He was praised as a landscapist by the chronicler of Haarlem, Samuel van Ampzing, as early as 1628. Together with Pieter Molijn (1595-1661) and Jan van Goyen (1596-1656), he was a pioneer in c.1626-1632 of tonal landscape painting. This movement brought an unprecedented naturalistic unity to landscapes through diagonal designs, atmospheric effects and a restricted (‘monochromatic’) palette of earth tones. Like many Dutch painters, Salomon also had an extra-artistic career; he was mentioned as a merchant in 1651, dealing in blue dye for Haarlem’s bleacheries. Salomon was a practicing Mennonite but held several offices in the local painters’ guild. His wife, Maycken Buysse, was buried in St Bavo’s Church in Haarlem at Christmas 1660. He too was buried there in 1670. While Salomon seems to have lived his entire life in Haarlem, topographic references in his landscape paintings suggest that he visited many places throughout the Netherlands, including Leiden, Utrecht, Amersfoort, Arnhem, Alkmaar, Rhenen and Dordrecht. In addition to landscapes, numerous river views, and seascapes, Salomon painted a few still lifes. His son, Salomon van Ruysdael (c.1629/30-1681), also became a landscape painter and was heavily influenced by his father.

As mentioned, Salomon’s earliest treatments of his favoured halt before the inn theme date from 1631 and include two paintings (Szepmuveszeti Muzeum, Budapest, inv. 260, and Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, no. 901C; respectively Stechow 1938/75, nos. 181 and 232) which employ a diagonal composition with a road receding from right to left beneath tall trees and a centrally situated inn in the middle distance. The design of the Budapest painting (optional fig. 1), with the recession counterbalanced and moderated by a second road in the foreground moving from left to right, already anticipates aspects of the present work’s composition, even though it dates almost three decades later. While river views had outnumbered landscapes in Salomon’s art during the early 1630s, the halt before the inn subject became of much greater interest to the artist in the mid 1640s as he turned to scenes on dry land that stressed more compositional structure (for discussion see Stechow 1938/75, pp. 21-22; and idem., Dutch Landscape Painting of the Seventeenth Century, London 1966, pp. 27-28). The inns now loomed larger in the design and he often introduced a dark band of shadow to the immediate foreground, serving as a repoussoir to enhance space, but with a less insistent diagonal recession than previously (see for example, the Halt before an Inn dated 1643, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena; Stechow 1938/75, no. 147). An especially significant precursor for the present work is a painting of travellers, complete with gypsies, before an inn beneath tall trees, dated 1645, in a Private Collection (optional fig. 2; see exh. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, also shown Museum of Fine Art, Boston, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Masters of 17^th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, 1987, cat. 92, illus.). The scale and elements of the design are very close - the sweeping road with sharp curve, the distribution of the towering trees to the right and far left, and the cattle before the flooded roadway in the immediate foreground. That work announced the advent of Salomon’s mature classicist style that would place more emphasis on form, structure and local colour, coming to fruition in the 1650s and 60s. The master’s style of the latter decade brought creative variations on his time-honoured themes and distinctive details, all witnessed in the present work, such as more attenuated trees, a slightly more painterly touch and more colorful and opaque hues. Two paintings, dated respectively 1660 and 1663 (optional fig. 3), of the halt by the inn theme from the early 1660s in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, (nos. 2083 and 1566; Stechow 1938/75, no. 158 & 163) are also comparable in style and design, and the latter even reintroduces the ubiquitous gypsy fortune teller among the staffage.

The landscape theme of the halt before the inn can be traced to earlier Flemish landscape painting (Jan Breughel the younger and others) as can the gypsy theme. The latter appears, for example, in the art of Jan Breughel and Joos de Momper, David Teniers the Younger, Jacques de Gheyn, and many others. Indeed in landscapes by artists like David Vinckboons, the gypsy fortune-teller seems to be linked with the medieval notion of the landscape as a pilgrimage of life - the road of life on which guidance to one’s fortune might be eagerly sought (see for an image and discussion, exh. cat. Madrid, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, The Golden Age of Dutch Landscape Painting, 1994, p. 54, fig. 57). While it seems unlikely that Salomon conceived his many landscapes with gypsies as paysages moralisés, the residue of the tradition could have contributed to the frequency of their appearance. We also should remember that spring was the season when cattle were driven to market, as was stressed in the captions to prints by Jan van de Velde and others, hence their frequent appearance in numbers in Salomon’s paintings, either fording inundated roads or watering in the pools left by rain. Cattle are particularly prominent on the roads of the foregrounds of Salomon’s landscapes in the early 1660s; see for example the halt by the inn paintings of 1661 in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, no. E’24-3-55, and the painting of 166(?) (respectively, Stechow 1938/75, no. 160 and 165, illus.). One last feature in the present painting and its related works is worth mentioning: some of the most beautiful details in Salomon’s landscapes are the fluttering, silvery, new leaves of spring. They recall Karel van Mander’s prescription in his ‘Den Grondt der edel vrij schilderconst’ (‘The foundation of the noble art of painting’) in his Het Schilderboek (The Hague, 1604, chap. 8, verse 40) to aspiring young landscapists that they should be careful to observe foliage minutely, even the lighter underbellies of the leaves.

Report by Peter C Sutton.

Comparative images:

Salomon van Ruysdael

Halt before the Inn

Monogrammed and dated 1631

Oil on panel 56 x 86.4 cm.

Szepmuveszeti Muzeum, Budapest, inv. 260

Salomon van Ruysdael

Halt before the Inn

Signed and dated 1645

Oil on panel 69.5 x 92.5 cm.

Private Collection

Salomon van Ruysdael

Halt before the Inn

Signed and dated 1663, Oil on canvas 105 x 150.5 cm.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. A 2571