Majestic Beauty and Harmony - a Comparison and Contrast Study

Landscape

Majestic Beauty and Harmony

A Comparison and Contrast Study

Jacob van Ruisdael, Thomas Cole, and Nicolas Poussin were essential in furthering the artistic genre of landscape painting. Their ideas and social backgrounds play a major part in their influence on artistic development. Each coming from different cultures and different environments from which their style developed and influenced many. Comparing the differences in the artists’ styles and how they were developed will hopefully accomplish an understanding of the timeframe in which they lived.

One of the most influential landscape artists of the seventeenth century, Jacob van Ruisdael (1628-1682) was born in Haarlem, the capital of North Holland in the Netherlands.  Demonstrating his unique ability and innovative skill of handling paint, he brings out his remarkable power of observation.  His treatment of light, color and compositional structure captivated and influenced generations of admires and other landscape artists.^[1] In his painting View of Haarlem From the Dunes at Overveen (1670) he celebrates the Dutch’s love of landscapes and nature. The vast and glorious skies dominate the majority of this painting.  Ruisdael’s use of perspective, shadows and light give this landscape painting a three-dimensional feel. The breaking light through the billowing clouds, illuminates the crop fields in patches and accentuates the monumental and spacious feeling of the landscape.  The textured roofs and their different coloring on the houses stand out and seem to be reflecting light off of them.  The contrast of the bright sky and dark earth gives this paining a very dramatic visual effect. At the foot of the dunes the viewer sees the lengths of linens being pulled across the fields to bleach in the sun demonstrating one of Haarlem’s industries which gave interest to the local market.^[2]  There are several windmills in the background that refer to the land reclamation efforts after the Spanish had left the land in ruins along with the St. Bavo church that succeeds in giving this painting a quiet spiritual feeling.

        Thomas Cole (1801–1848) was a premiere artist of the nineteenth century using landscape art as a means of upholding traditional beliefs.  Cole, an American romantic landscape artist was born in Lancashire, England and emigrated to the United States with his family at the age of seventeen. His inspiration of American landscape painters came to be known as the Hudson River School.  His belief was that materialism, democracy and expansion in the Jacksonian era were taking over^[3] and he presented his pristine paintings of wilderness and nature as a way of celebrating what he saw as America’s “antiquities.”  His painting View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm- The Oxbow evokes the sublime and emphasizes the untamed wilderness as the dark storm clouds roll out and the bright sky reveals a pastoral settlement, perhaps hinting at the future prospects of the American nation. Cole used European landscape conventions to appeal to the American market by raising the viewpoint and stretching the composition to a panoramic view. The loop in the river is nicknamed “The Oxbow” because the shape is a resemblance of a bowed collar of a yoked ox. A bright sky is revealed as a gloomy thunderstorm drifts away. A tree trunk perhaps struck by lightning in the storm symbolizes the untamed wilderness. Cole includes a self-portrait of him at work painting The Oxbow. His umbrella, which he has been known to use to shade himself while sketching, unites the two sides of the dramatically opposite composition. He has transformed his traditional view into an allegory about his unrest between nature and industry.

        Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) born in Normandy, pursued his career in Italy and became a central figure for the Roman and European art of his time. He founded the French Classical tradition. By 1633 he discarded the seductive style of Venetian painting and took on a more rational and disciplined style influenced by the Classicism of Raphael and antiquity.^[4]  Poussin was a pioneer of landscape painting. Known as “the philosopher painter” he features clarity, logic and order in his paintings favoring line over color.  Landscape with St. John on the Patmos is the first of a pair of paintings the second being called Landscape with St. Matthew and the Angel. John reclines in the foreground looking like a Greco-Roman god as an eagle stands behind him. Around him are fallen columns and a base where a statue once stood, a ruined temple and an Egyptian obelisk depicting the end of great civilizations and their Greco-Roman beliefs and the beginning of the new era of Christianity.  A large tree on either side frame the painting showing his concern with the order of harmony and nature.^[5] His dedication to order and logic is reinforced as the viewer’s eye is lead from the foreground to the middle and on to the background by a series of curves and shapes.  Poussin didn’t paint by the rules of atmospheric perspective, he painted classical settings of design that he imagined.