Artwork · 17th century · Jacob van Ruisdael

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Landscape with the Ruins of the Castle of Egmond

Jacob van Ruisdael1650–55Oil on canvas98 × 130 cm

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At a glance

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A half-ruined red brick tower rises under heavy storm clouds and stands mirrored in still, dark water.
Jacob van Ruisdael painted it in oil on canvas between 1650 and 1655, when he was in his twenties.
The tower is what remained of the real Castle of Egmond, deliberately wrecked during the Dutch revolt against Spain, so for Dutch viewers it was a place loaded with national memory.

Reading the picture

5 places to look closer

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Zoom in on the top of the tower. The brick wall breaks off in jagged steps, like a mouth missing teeth, and small square holes are scattered across it. Patches of white plaster show through the cracks. Behind it, blue-black clouds pile in.
Look at the broken walls to the left of the tower. Only a row of arches still stands, and below them chunks of brickwork have tumbled down at angles, half buried in weeds. In the middle of the rubble you can just make out a tiny figure in a hat. The smaller the person, the bigger the ruin feels.
Zoom in on the red speck in the meadow to the right. A shepherd in a red jacket leans on his staff, with white sheep grazing around him. In all that dim green, one touch of red pulls your eye across the picture.
Look down at the water. The tower and the broken walls hang upside down in it, a red shadow on dark water. Even the grass at the foot of the wall carries on down into the reflection.
Zoom in on the sky to the upper left of the tower. Two birds fly there, each one a single quick flick of the brush. Under those enormous clouds, these tiny marks tell you how big the sky is.

When it was painted

Around 1650 Jacob van Ruisdael was a painter of about twenty-one. He was born in Haarlem, the son of Isaack van Ruisdael, a frame maker who also painted, and his uncle Salomon van Ruysdael was a well-known landscape painter. In 1648 Jacob joined the Haarlem painters' guild.

The castle in this picture stood at Egmond, north of Haarlem in the province of North Holland. The Art Institute of Chicago explains that it was deliberately destroyed by the Dutch themselves during the revolt against Spain, more than eighty years before Ruisdael painted it. The broken tower had become a reminder of what independence had cost.

Those years were a fresh start for the country. The Peace of Münster in 1648 finally recognized the Dutch Republic, and landscape painters chose places that stood for the new nation: ruins, windmills and city views. According to the museum, Ruisdael stood out by painting on an unusually large scale and by charging his scenes with drama through low horizons and swollen clouds.

In the mid-1650s Ruisdael moved to Amsterdam, where he later trained pupils such as Meindert Hobbema. In the early twentieth century this canvas belonged to the Berlin collector Oscar Huldschinsky. After his collection was sold in 1928, the painting entered the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947.

Look again at the tower in the water. A castle broken by war became, under a young painter's brush, a monument standing between sky and water.

The painter

Jacob van Ruisdael

1628–1682

All paintings by Jacob van Ruisdael →

More by the same painter

Dune Landscape with Oak Tree1650–55

Wheat Fieldsca. 1670

Questions to think about

Look for itHow many people can you find hidden in this landscape?
Why?Why do you think Ruisdael kept the horizon so low and gave more than half the picture to storm clouds?
What about you?The Castle of Egmond was torn down on purpose and then became a place of memory. What place near me is remembered even after it was destroyed or disappeared?

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