Van
Ruisdael, born into a family of landscapists, created masterpieces before the
age of twenty which are still admired today. His attention to detail makes his
landscapes incredibly accurate: he was the first artist to paint trees whose
genera could be identified by modern botanists. In this piece, however, he
hides his usual precision by throwing the scene into darkness. His trees,
usually lovingly perfected even to the individual leaves, are here mostly cast
into a deep shadow. Like ships on a stormy sea, the trees seem to rock and bend
on the uneven ground, with leaves blowing past, nearly ripped off their
branches. In the foreground, van Ruisdael includes a dead tree (typical of his
landscapes) which alone is serenely unaffected by the wind, even its leaves
somehow still despite the gale whipping through the younger trees. Similarly,
though most of the sky lies hidden under foreboding storm clouds, near the
horizon sunlight shines over gently rolling hills. Even in the raging storm,
light and calm are not absent.
