Agrarian Landscapes as Serious Art

Jacob Ruisdael (1629-1682) was born to a prominent Haarlem artist family and became the preeminent landscapist of the Dutch Golden Age. His sweeping canvases included numerous coastal and Scandinavian mountain scenes, and twenty-seven views of grain fields also survive as paintings and drawings. In works like Wheat Fields (c. 1670), Ruisdael’s composition features a low […]