Landscape with the view of Haarlem

Ruisdael was born in Haarlem, where he was an apprentice and spent his first years as a self-employed painter. Yet it was not until much later that he first made his home town the subject of paintings – long after his move to Amsterdam. Views of Haarlem from a distance of the type shown in this picture are examples of Ruisdael’s landscape art in its most mature form.
From about 1670, they extend the repertoire of subjects through a lavish variety of forms. From a raised viewpoint on the dunes to the north-west of Haarlem, approximately from Bloemendaal, the eye glimpses in the distance the roof of the town glowing red, the massive Church of Sint Bavo, on the left the Bakenesser Church, the Sint Jans Kerk and the Klockhuis, to the right the town hall and Nieuwe Kerk, and at the edge of the town numerous grain mills on the town walls. On the flat plain of the countryside, the cloudy sky, raised high over a low horizon, is reflected in alternating strips of light and shade. In the marked-off foreground, great lengths of linen have been spread out to bleach, a familiar sight in the surroundings of Haarlem at that time. Bleaching linen, both of cloth made in Holland and goods imported from Germany, England and Scandinavia, was among the leading economic activities in the town, thanks to the clear water of the dunes. Ruisdael, in almost all of his
“Haarlempjes”, as contemporaries called this kind of landscape, which was created by him and continued by Jan van Kessel and Jan Vermeer van Haarlem, accorded an especially prominent place to the motif of bleaching cloth.
In 1813, Goethe admired the perfect symbolism in the artist’s works in an essay entitled Ruisdael as a Poet. The interaction between forms close to nature and a significant statement is indeed an essential characteristic of Ruisdael’s work, in which 17th-century Dutch landscape painting attained its impressive peak. Jan Kelch | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019