Jacob van Ruisdael

Abstract

In his monographic essay on Jacob van Ruisdael, first published in 1902, Alois Riegl engages not only Ruisdael’s landscapes, but also explores theoretical questions concerning the relation between beholder and image on the basis of the formal analysis of key works. This carries moral and ethical implications for the act of viewing, which should, argues Riegl, be both selfless and disinterested. In seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, as developed not only by Ruisdael but by such countrymen as Rembrandt, Seghers, and Van Goyen, Riegl identifies atmosphere as an entity—as an all-encompassing atmospheric tone spread across the entire surface—rather than as a series of individual colorations derived from the individual objects depicted in the landscape. The response of the beholder to the totality of the work is thus framed by Riegl in terms of contemporary theories of empathy.