Estuary landscape with fishermen and strollers. Salomon Van Ruysdael & workshop 17th century

Salomon Van Ruysdael and his workshop
17th-century Dutch school

Oil on oak panel with parquet floor.
Very beautiful and sober frame in exotic wood (rosewood or ebony).
Size with frame: 67 x 91 cm. Panel alone: 47 x 70 cm

This view of an estuary bustling with fishermen and strollers is typical of the art of the Dutch Golden Age.
It is meticulously composed, without describing reality precisely, painted all in glaze, lightly brushed with an economy of means, the characters are made by simple touches of color, but the essential is there!

It's all about moving and conveying a poetic, melancholy vision of the painter's usual environment.
He shows us an estuary with large sailing boats and a few fishing boats floating on calm water. In the right foreground, villagers stroll and converse under large oak trees, their imposing branches reflected on the water.

The palette remains in shades of gray, brown and white, in harmony with the cloudy sky that covers three-quarters of the painting.

Salomon van Ruysdael (Naarden circa 1602-Haarlem 1670)

Uncle of Jacob van Ruisdael and father of Jacob Salomonsz van Ruisdael, born in Naarden, member of the Haarlem guild in 1626, died in the same town in 1670. Along with his contemporary, the Leyden-born Jan van Goyen, whose work shows a parallel development, Salomon van Ruysdael was one of the first great Dutch landscape and marine painters. Like Van Goyen during his time in Haarlem, Ruysdael was most likely a pupil of Esaias van de Velde, whose discoveries he amplified and brought to greater mastery. These raised the landscape to the level of a genre - and a specifically Dutch one at that - by ridding it of its historical and symbolic content, moving away from the Flemish Mannerist tradition of the constructed landscape.

Ruysdael left an abundant output of paintings, and his winter landscapes recall, with greater freedom, those of Esaias van de Velde. Already, the anecdotal elements - hockey players, figures in sleighs, etc. - inherited from Bruegel through Avercamp's work, are subjected to the expression of landscape and the rendering of atmosphere.

A little later, Ruysdael moved closer to the dune landscapes of Pieter Molyn and Pieter van Santvoort, one of the favorite themes of this early period of Dutch landscape painting, along with panoramas and river views. From 1631 onwards, he asserted his mastery of style; his landscapes display all the characteristics of the Haarlem school of still-life and genre painters of the same period: a taste for the elongated format, a sober composition simply made up of two horizontals, those of water and sky, which now occupy three-quarters of the picture, and a concern for expressing values, rather than color, which literally dissolves in light, resulting in an overall monochromy of gray-green and brown. After 1640, unlike Van Goyen, Ruysdael's painting showed a taste for brighter tones, without losing the nuance and lightness of technique of the “tonality” period: delicate pinks and blues for the skies, red and brown spots for the figures, who become more numerous, yet remain perfectly integrated into the landscape. Ruysdael was, like his nephew Jacob van Ruisdael, a first-rate painter of skies...

Very good condition. Sold with certificate