Artist: Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/1629–1682)
Title: Two Watermills and an Open Sluice
Genre: landscape art
Date: 1653
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: height: 664 mm (26.1 in)
Collection: Getty Center
What I Love about this painting:
This painting is the perfect writing prompt. Peaceful and serene, the scene shows us two watermills opposite each other on the stream, sharing the power of the water. These mills were examples of the highest technology of that time, and the families who owned them were prosperous middle-class people. Very likely they were literate, well-respected members of the local community.
Were these mills owned by the same family?
Or were they owned by rivals, competing to grind the grain produced by the local farmers? Is one a grist mill and the other a lumber mill? Or a weaver’s mill housing looms?
Was there a love story behind their being so close to each other, perhaps a Romeo and Juliet-style romance? (Tragedy averted, of course, or it wouldn’t be a romance.)
This is a wonderful painting, a window into the past.
About the artist, via Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Jacob Isaackszoon van Ruisdael (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈjaːkɔp fɑn ˈrœyzˌdaːl] ⓘ; c. 1629 – 10 March 1682) was a Dutch painter, draughtsman, and etcher. He is generally considered the pre-eminent landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, a period of great wealth and cultural achievement when Dutch painting became highly popular.
Prolific and versatile, Ruisdael depicted a wide variety of landscape subjects. From 1646 he painted Dutch countryside scenes of remarkable quality for a young man. After a trip to Germany in 1650, his landscapes took on a more heroic character. In his late work, conducted when he lived and worked in Amsterdam, he added city panoramas and seascapes to his regular repertoire. In these, the sky often took up two-thirds of the canvas. In total he produced more than 150 Scandinavian views featuring waterfalls.
Ruisdael’s only registered pupil was Meindert Hobbema, one of several artists who painted figures in his landscapes. Hobbema’s work has at times been confused with Ruisdael’s. Ruisdael always spelt his name thus: Ruisdael, not Ruysdael.
Ruisdael’s work was in demand in the Dutch Republic during his lifetime. Today it is spread across private and institutional collections around the world; the National Gallery in London, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg hold the largest collections. Ruisdael shaped landscape painting traditions worldwide, from the English Romantics to the Barbizon school in France, and the Hudson River School in the US, and influenced generations of Dutch landscape artists. [1]
To read more about this artist, go to Jacob van Ruisdael – Wikipedia
About this painting via Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Two Water Mills with an Open Sluice, also known as Two Watermills and an Open Sluice, Two Undershot Water Mills with an Open Sluice is a 1653 painting by the Dutch Golden Age painter Jacob van Ruisdael. It is in the collection of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
The painting shows two working undershot water mills, with the major one being half-timbered with a cob-facade construction, tie beams, and vertical plank gable. This is characteristic of the water mills in the Bentheim area in Germany, to where Ruisdael had travelled in the early 1650s. This painting is one of six known variations on this theme and the only one that is dated.
Although other Western artists had depicted water mills before, Ruisdael was the first to make it the focal subject in a painting. Meindert Hobbema, Ruisdael’s pupil, started working on the water mills subject in the 1660s. Today Hobbema is more strongly associated with water mills than his teacher.
The painting is known by various names. The painting is called Two Water Mills with an Open Sluice in Seymour Slive‘s 2001 catalogue raisonné of Ruisdael, catalogue number 119. In his 2011 book on Ruisdael’s mills and water mills Slive calls it Two Undershot Water Mills with an Open Sluice. The Getty Museum calls it Two Watermills and an Open Sluice on their website, object number 82.PA.18. [2]
Credits and Attributions:
Wikipedia contributors, “Two Water Mills with an Open Sluice,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Two_Water_Mills_with_an_Open_Sluice&oldid=1160869306 (accessed November 16, 2023).
[2] Wikipedia contributors, “Jacob van Ruisdael,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jacob_van_Ruisdael&oldid=1181677660 (accessed November 16, 2023).
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