Estuary Landscape With Fishermen And Walkers. Salomon Van Ruysdael And His Workshop (17th Century)

*Salomon Van Ruysdael and his workshop 17th century Dutch School Oil on parquet oak panel. Very beautiful and sober exotic wood frame (rosewood or ebony) Panel only: 47 x 70 cm This view of an estuary bustling with fishermen and walkers is typical of the art of the Dutch Golden Age. It is meticulously composed, without precisely describing reality, painted all in glaze, lightly brushed with an economy of means, the characters are made by simple touches of color, but the essential is there! It is first of all a question of moving and transmitting a poetic vision full of melancholy of the painter's usual environment. He shows us an estuary with large sailing boats and a few fishing boats floating on calm water. In the foreground on the right, villagers walk and converse, they have taken their places under large oaks whose imposing branches are reflected on the water. The palette remains in shades of gray, brown, white, allowing to be in harmony with the cloudy sky which is established on three-quarters of the painting. Salomon van Ruysdael (Naarden around 1602-Haarlem 1670) Uncle of Jacob van Ruisdael and father of Jacob Salomonsz van Ruisdael, born in Naarden, member of the Haarlem guild in 1626, died in the same city in 1670, Salomon van Ruysdael is, with his contemporary the Leidse Jan van Goyen whose work presents a parallel development, one of the first great Dutch landscape and marine painters. Like Van Goyen during his stay in Haarlem, Ruysdael was very probably the pupil of Esaias van de Velde, whose discoveries he would amplify and bring to a greater mastery. These elevate the landscape to the level of a genre - and a specifically Dutch genre - by stripping it of its historical and symbolic content, by moving away from the Flemish Mannerist tradition of the constructed landscape. Ruysdael left behind an abundant production of paintings, his winter landscapes recall, with more freedom, those of Esaias van de Velde: already, the anecdotal elements - hockey players, figures in sleighs, etc. -, inherited from Bruegel through the work of Avercamp, are subjected to the expression of the landscape and the rendering of the atmosphere. A little later, Ruysdael approaches the dune landscapes of Pieter Molyn and Pieter van Santvoort, one of the favourite themes of this first period of the Dutch landscape with the panoramas and views of waterways. From 1631, he asserts the mastery of his style; his landscapes then present all the characteristics that are found at the same time in the painters of still lifes and genre scenes of the Haarlem school: taste for the elongated format, sobriety of the composition simply formed of two horizontals, those of the water and the sky, which now occupies three-quarters of the painting, and finally concern for the expression of values, rather than of color, literally dissolved in the light, which gives an overall gray-green and brown monochrome. After 1640, his painting, unlike that of Van Goyen, shows a taste for more vivid tones, without losing the nuanced aspect and lightness of the technique of the "tonality" period: delicate pinks and blues of the skies, red and brown spots of the characters who become more numerous, while remaining perfectly integrated into the landscape. Ruysdael is, like his nephew Jacob van Ruisdael, a painter of skies of the first order... Very good condition. Sold with certificate