Art in Translation, Volume 4, Issue 2, pp. 149162 DOI: 10.2752/175613112X13309377913007 Reprints available directly from the Publishers.

Photocopying permitted by licence only. 2012 Berg.

Alois Riegl Translated by Christopher P. Heuer

First published in German as Jakob van Ruysdael, Die Graphischen Knste, XXV, 1902, pp. 1120.

Jacob van Ruisdael

Abstract
In his monographic essay on Jacob van Ruisdael, rst published in 1902, Alois Riegl engages not only Ruisdaels 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 seless 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 identies atmosphere as an entityas an all-encompassing atmospheric tone

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spread across the entire surfacerather 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. KEYWOrds: art theory, Dutch art, landscape painting, nature in art, Ruisdael, Rembrandt, Van Goyen, beholder, attentiveness, Stimmung

Introduction by Christopher P. Heuer (Princeton University)

The writings of art historian and curator Alois Riegl (18581905) are fundamental to the discipline of art history, not only because of their incipient rigor regarding form. They matter in more recent decades for their attention to the viewing act, the aesthetics of reception. The Ruisdael essay is a set piece in such thinking, particularly central to Riegls work on Aufmerksamkeitattention. It has all the more import today as virtual modes of visual experience and communication instate and disruptnew conditions under which artworks are encountered. Alois Riegl wrote very little about landscape; what he did has been assailed as mystical and oblique. The same might be said for his writing on the elusive and well-worn concept of Aufmerksamkeit. Evocative comments on space, nature, and genre weave throughout Riegls lecture notes and unpublished oeuvre, but nowhere are they as systematically, potently (and cryptically) wielded toward an entire reconceptualization of art historys relation to a subject as in the little-known 1902 essay on the Dutch landscapist Jacob van Ruisdael. Originally a lecture, the sixteen-page essay has no footnotes, and is wandering, scantly illustrated, and even magical in its formal analysis. Riegl threads his observations through multiple (and often contradictory) understandings of Stimmung (mood, or atmosphere), which he takes as a quasi-spatial entity circulating amidst pictorial elements. At the same time, Stimmung gures for Riegl as something spilling out of the painting and permeating the beholderpicture encounter. What results is an unconventional and difcult update of Romantic notions of poetic communication.1 It hardly seems surprising that, when Riegls essay has been read, it has been berated for inaccuracies and outright disregard of fact. And yet the piece dazzlingly displays an unexpected take on landscape painting in f in de sicle Vienna, which Riegl does not so much link to an older painting idiom as wield dialectically to activate then-current notions of Einfhlung for Dutch art. If Riegl returned to fashion in the 1980s as a champion of neglected and transitional art forms, regions, and epochs, the Ruisdael article is unique within his corpus for seizing upon a single well-known artist

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and a conventional old master genrethe easel landscape painting yet using a lens which disavows historicism entirely. It is a distillation of all the thoughts on Dutch painting that the hollndische Gruppenportrt, published the same year (1902), explored.2 And yet, the small essay is more than that. Launching from the now-familiar conviction that any construction of original context was folly, it asked, for one of the rst times in art history, how non-gural art might establish a conceptual relationship with a beholder. Riegl, however, never assumes that this relationship by necessity must even exist. He presents attention as always in conf lict with distraction, as something more anguished than a passive looking. This is a move which foreshadows Riegls revival within the Struktranalyse of the 1930s. Presaged, then, in the Ruisdael essay is a recongured idea of art history as an aesthetic act itself. Riegls emphasis upon the viewers often irrational role in the interpretation of Dutch compositions within the museum setting, bears serious implications for the history of art in general, and should appeal to art historians interested in nineteenth-century thought as well as seven teenth-century painting. The essay offers a rethinking of artviewer relations which is worth consideration for all subelds.

Jacob van Ruisdael

Alois Riegl
Modern art historical research teaches that real landscape painting appears for the rst time in arts history in the work of seventeenth century Dutch painters. Even granting the modern tendency to judge the art of earlier periods, objections to this doctrine are unconvincing. Todays landscape painting strives to unite all individual things on and above the ground into a unied whole, by means of the atmosphere between the individual things; it shapes the landscape through the atmosphere. The Dutch of the baroque period were the rst who strove for this in a clear and conscious way, in fact. With them, a unifying effect was attempted not by coordinating the tactile edges of things, or via the local colors that lled those edges, as it had in earlier stylistic periods. Rather, the Dutch strove for such an effect through a harmony of color based on purely optical sensations. Their atmospherewhich now had to be painted next to the individual thingsis thus not to be apprehended through the organs of the tactile sense. Therefore, it is reproducible only in one way: individual things have to give up their tactile, tangible, and objective-physical character to reveal themselves only as optical stimuli. They are ecks of color that can be reassembled

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as individual things, only in the mind of the beholder. And this takes place through an activation of that beholders sensory experience. To a much higher degree than tactile stimuli, optical stimuli are dependent on subjective variations, even if the former (and this is unavoidable in painting) can only be triggered by the visual sense. A subjective concept of individual thingsrather than the objective concept that reigned in antiquity and partly still in the Renaissanceis therefore crucial to both Dutch and modern landscape painting. For both, orientation is no longer drawn from things, but from the beholding subjectand this orientation nds its particular expression in linear and aerial perspective, constructed from one specic point of view. In all these respects, the difference between Dutch and modern landscape paintings must be characterized simply as a quantitative one. We are much more sensitive today to errors in drawing, or defects in light, aws present even in the most celebrated Dutch masters. The point at which Dutch and modern landscape fundamentally part company from each other, however, is in the perception of atmosphere, and in the way this atmosphere is correspondingly depicted. The seventeenth-century Dutch painters regarded atmosphere as an independent entity, something that had no connection with the individual things between which it circulated. The atmosphere thus positioned itself like a colored veil in front of and between things. It received its colored appearance only from light in its various forms, in all possible degrees of intensity, down to the deepest shadows, as sunlight or articial ame. The moderns, by contrast, with their tendency to combine such elements within a picture, go a step further. They set the individual things in interaction with each other within the atmosphere. This occurs in such a way that the normally colorless atmosphere receives its coloring from the reections of individual things: the tone of the air is no longer, in essence, simply light, but the result of the color reected from the individual elements assembled within the picture. In modern painting, such elements demand much more attention than in Dutch painting, where single things were repressed by an independently colored atmos phere. It is easy to see that of all Dutch landscape painters, the one who would inevitably nd the highest appreciation from the moderns was the one who paid comparatively more regard to the individual coloration of things, rather than to an all-encompassing atmospheric tone. This painter was none other than Jacob van Ruisdael; he represents both the highest and the most mature stage of development in seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. That development had, in fact, three stages. The earliest is represented by a group of tonal painters around Jan van Goyen (Figure 1). These painters rendered the atmosphere in a monotone-colored light, one that ranged from straw yellow to gray-green, tinting over the local colors of individual elements. The coloristic effect of these paintings was so unnatural and mannered, that it was thought necessary to excuse it

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Figure 1 Jan van Goyen, View of the Merwede before Dordrecht, c.1660. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

by reference to the misty atmosphere of the Netherlands. The individual things themselves areas one saysinadequately observed, which is to say that optical appearance of detail does not emerge vividly enough to nourish the organ of sight adequately. The sensory entreaty to complete the picture is never actively aroused. We still discern things largely in general contours, as in earlier periods of art. On the other hand, these masters still try to introduce into the picture motifs that are thematically interesting and amusing; namely the work of humans. No longer depicting grand or stately activities, the pictures instead reveal the daily business beside the rivers and in the villages in its stark simplicity. Even if, as mentioned above, the mind of the beholder is not sufciently engaged by the colors, it is greatly stimulated by the contentjust as it is with the less atmospheric art of antiquity and the Renaissance. The second stage of the development is represented by Rembrandt and his circle. He overcomes monotone with a chiaroscuro that creates nothing but a spatial darkness. With his chiaroscuro, he breaks the limited, tactile effect of local colors and contours. Rembrandt does understand, however, how to renderwith certitudethe specics of things that are optically effective. He understands how to contain space within measurable connes rather than stretching it into a lulling boundlessness, and how to suppress material interest in the individual object. Despite this, we do not today count Rembrandts works among the greatest achievements of Dutch landscape painting. And rightfully so, even if they are only spoken of with the greatest respect. For, nowadays, we no more see nature as brownly as Rembrandt painted it than we see it as straw-colored as it appears in Salomon van Ruisdaels works. For that reason, Rembrandts

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etched landscapes seem to us more convincing, since they dispense with the localized colors that made up his tan chiaroscuro. Rembrandt, the history painter, was never fully able to overcome the impulse toward subordination. His tendency to accentuate particular areas through the most intense light, while casting other parts as glowering in the shadows, is at odds with the total, unied, equality of such things demanded by a strictly atmospheric landscape. We should not, therefore, be surprised that the broad preoccupation of Rembrandts landscape painting is the human form. It is the interest in man that inescapably captures the observer. It does not accord with the idea of an extreme modern subjectivism and a total subordination of man to nature. And yet, this last point does not always prove true for Rembrandt. In his work, humans can claim their place in natureit might be that Rembrandt came up with the exact degree to which humans may be permitted to enter a landscape, without, however, jeopardizing that landscapes atmospheric effect. All the deciencies that modern subjectivity still feels obliged to complain about in Rembrandts landscape painting were corrected by Jacob van Ruisdael, or at least in those instances where he could manage to work with completely illuminated space as a connective medium, and not with an atmosphere colored only by the reection of things. It is a resolute tone that reigns in his landscapes, a tone greenish or brownish, but never so monochrome that it decolorizes the individual things in an unnatural wayas occurs in van Goyen or Rembrandt, or in the willful color values of certain modern landscape painters. That is the reason that the conservative, but in general modern-thinking art lover is willing to prize Jacob van Ruisdael above all modern painters. Ruisdael never loses himself to the ambiguous or indeterminate, neither in the extension of space nor in the details of individual things. For him, sky and earth are completely equivalent. Fromentins assertion that Jacob van Ruisdael introduced the observation of the clouded sky into landscape painting is, therefore, incorrect, for it could lead to the opinion that the early Dutch painters understood the area above the ground only as a neutral relief-ground, as it was in antiquity. Van Goyen and Rembrandt did not simply do what had been quite customary since the fteenth century, namely to treat this area as space and animate it with clouds. They also gradated the connecting function that they recognized in the sky: van Goyen through tonality, Rembrandt through dark/light contrast (with a predilection for the mood of the thunderstorm). In Jacob van Ruisdaels landscapes, individual things are always coordinated. No single one is emphasized at the expense of another. Where this rule appears to have been broken, namely in the pictures from his late period, this can be ascribed to certain moments of his development, as we will see. Ultimately, Ruisdael allows the human gure to sink into in the ensemble of natural things, in particular, things vegetal. Wherever he needs staffage to clarify distances and proportions, he asks others to paint it. This was sometimes naively regarded as an inability on his part; as though a

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master who was able to render convincinglywith just a few strokes the optic appearance of a tree found it difcult to delineate the strokes needed for modest human staffage. Ruisdael thought of his landscapes as uninhabited. As soon as his artistic conception was realized in the picture, he left the necessary evils of staffage to his colleagues, to more gure-minded painters who probably delighted in the welcome change. Although Jacob van Ruisdael did not live much beyond fty years (he was born sometime in the late 1620s and died in 1682), he left behind a remarkable number of pictures. Since we have secure information about the poor prices that were paid for his pictures, and since we can assume that this hard-working man would have made more money in almost every other occupation, we gain the image of an ideal painter, whose entire existence was driven by the urge to give expression to his inner visions. Such a rich production could not have occurred without a gradual development, and we can in fact outline this development with some certainty on the basis of Ruisdaels dated works. Ruisdaels development followed the same direction that Dutch seventeenth-century painting tookfrom a relative objectivity toward an ever more austere subjectivism of views, culminating in a reversal to the opposite extreme, almost coincidental with the original point of departure. This condition is o bservable in the masters last period. The earliest, the Haarlem period, dating from around the mid-1640s, is represented in compositions like the Forest Village Behind Dunes in the Dresden gallery. Here the convenient device of the tonal painters is applied: the more important motifs are pushed so far back into the picture space that the tactility, the narrowness, and the impenetrability of these very motifs is somehow lost, so that the distant view remains the more reliable one. But the endless distance of the tonal painters, which allowed the horizon to disappear in a blur, is gone. Instead, the terrain ascends from the unprepossessing grass in the open foreground toward the background, so that the most important motifshouses and treescan be set on the highest ridge of the area, as silhouettes against the horizon. The trees no longer appear as a uniform wall; rather, they seem to arrange themselves in a row of individual treetops, in such a way that no one seems to be claiming more signicance than the other. A house with a gabled front looks into a valley, as does a windmill with crossed vanes and a church tower with a broken window. Two to three human gures serve as measures for distance; one would be sad not to have them in the vicinity of the village. Above lie clouds in the sky, individualized in both form and movement. If something here is missing, in which the modern beholder might entirely immerse himself in a disinterested gaze, it is due to the distance and smallness of the motifs, the relative absence of connection among them, the resulting objectivity namely of house, windmill, and churchand, nally, the highly agitated lines in the p icture, which are not restrained by dominant orthogonals. A second stage is marked by the Village in A Forest Valley (Figure 2) in the Berlin gallery. What we see here is already much more enclosed,

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Figure 2 Jacob Isaacsz van Ruisdael, Village at the Woods Edge, c.1651. Gemldegalerie, Staatliche Museum zu Berlin, Preuischer Kulturbesitz, Germany. Photo: Jrg P. Anders.

moved much nearer to the observer, and held together in a calm way by numerous verticals and horizontals. In the foreground, the foundation of the picture is a quiet stretch of water that does not stretch into the innite distance, but rather bends to the right and disappears behind a fantasy-provoking thicket. On the bank one can nd two shermena motif appropriate to the basic tendency in seventeenth-century Dutch painting to suppress any actions that stimulate the tactile senses, arousing the optical-mental impulses instead. In Rembrandts landscape paintings, too, we often see the sherman, whose activity is predicated on the most attentive viewing combined with absolute physical quiet. The houses in this village, almost without exception, turn to the beholder with their gabled fronts, shot through with windows, which seem to gaze at the beholder quietly. The background is terminated by a hill, whose trees are differentiated from each other right up to their individual treetops. A small tower looks backward toward the imagined continuation of the valley. This picture appeared at a time when most well-known landscape painters were occupied with the problem of how to represent broad surfaces; broad surfaces in which single elements emerge with complete clarity and terrain is shown preciselyand yet both remain in an undisturbed unity. Hercules Seghers led the way in this; but it was Rembrandt, undoubtedly aware of Segherss successes, who found the solution in his etching The Goldweighers Field, which bears the date 1652. This sheet certainly represents the greatest leap attempted in this direction by all Dutchmen of that time; the magnitude of the task and of Rembrandts success certainly reveals the nature of the master.

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As is so often the case with Rembrandt, his creations bearnext to their touching intimacya character of the grandiose, the absolute, and the eternal. In such an admixture Jacob van Ruisdael, however, would have seen a threat to the quiet intimacy of his purely subjective atmosphere and never, therefore, imbued his landscape paintings with such attenuated dimensions. The furthest he was inclined to go in this direction is represented in the often repeated (and therefore, obviously, often commissioned) views of his hometown of Haarlem, seen from the Dunes of Overveen. The exemplar can be found in the Berlin gallery (catalog no. 885 c), while others appear in the collections of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum and the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Here the background depth is not cut short by a mountain or high trees. Rather, the houses and towers of the citywhich is situated on level land mark the boundaries of the horizon. Barely one-third of the picture heighthow little!constitutes the noteworthy content of the picture: the Earth with its products and the activities of man. In contrast, twothirds of the entire height of the picture here is claimed by the cloudy sky, whose heavy force seems entirely appropriate as a counterbalance to the disruptive activities of humanity on the ground. Across the width of the picture, striations of light and shadow alternate, and by this means, the deep space is given a clear gradation. But the shadows never attain that darkness in which Rembrandts details shimmer, thus putting our capacity for intellectual completion to such a hard test that our mood of disinterested observation is disturbed, and the artists ambitions thwarted. Many recognizable gables emerge from the sea of houses; the Groote Kerk, which dominates everything in height and width, is nothing but a primus inter paressuperior in size, not in artistic signicanceas the eye is drawn away from the church along a row of houses to the foreground. Their optical scale is much the same as that of the church. As a result, the signicance of the church within the overall picture is effectively reduced. The church tower striving vertically away from the horizon, along with the side lines crossing the foreground reveal how muchin contrast to Ruisdaels earlier work, especially that in Dresdenhe is by now aware of the externally calming effect such lines impart. A similar tendency to restore the impression a unied planerather than that of individual objects set at various depthsis at the same time observable in Rembrandt. The third and, to our modern taste, most agreeable developmental phase appears in the Great Beech Forest in the imperial gallery in Vienna (Figure 3). This coincides with the masters time in Amsterdam, around 1660. Here all human activity is removed; one perceives almost nothing but trees, but each of them comes forward as an individual, and as a totality they lure us irresistibly into their shadows. Anyone who still needs to understand how a direct view of nature never yields a full and unadulterated atmosphere can learn from this picture. None of the trees has that insistent tactile dimensionas

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Figure 3 Jacob Isaacsz van Ruisdael, The Large Forest, c.16551660. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.

xperienced on every walk in a forestthat transxes the eye, taking e up the entire visual eld and thus never graspable at once. And yet, between the trees, the bright sky looks at the beholder with hundreds of eyes. Traces of human activity appear only in the path with ruddy ruts; such ruts are not winding about as they were in earlier pictures, searching into the depths, but now disappear vertically around a corner. In front, the path is crossed horizontally by a shallow stream, with standing water of that mysterious darkness that characterizes Ruisdaels landscapes. As staffage, we see a sitting wanderer resting contemplatively, and further back, in the shade of the giant trees, a striding couple, over whose diminutive forms the waves of a sea of foliage crash engulngly. The developmental process thus observed across Jacob van Ruisdaels work was essentially a process of reduction, a purication; all motifs that awaken the interest of the beholder in some subject matter, and which could distract from the contemplation of the whole, are progressively removed. Ultimately the pure enjoyment of looking is all that remains. Within the Great Beech Forest such a specically Dutch tendency attains its apotheosis. Any remnant of action as an expression of will has been done away with; what the artist represents and the beholder experiences is now pure sensation. This sensation, however, is not passive. The beholder still actively confronts the external things, which he perceives by means of his optical sense, in that he approaches them attentively. Except for its last phase, the entirety of Dutch painting can be described most concisely as a painting of attention. In this last phase, however,

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a turning point is reached at which sensation is no longer acuteit becomes, indeed, passive. This turning point was an ineluctable result of a constant increase in subjectivism. As long as artists and beholders simply confront external things through a mode of attentiveness, these external things retain a remnant of objectivity. Subjectivism must ultimately aspire to an even more intimate effect of the objects upon the subjects (beholder and artist). In such a case, attentiveness is not enough any morean affect has to take holdthe sensation must become passive. Thus it was an inevitable internal fate of Dutch painting of the seventeenth century that it changedas is knownin the course from Rembrandt to Van Dyck. This is a change that is to be deeply deplored from the view of modern taste, but must be accepted from the viewpoint of universal history, because it describes a progressive development. Within Ruisdaels own development, the beginning of such a change is marked by the emergence of new motifs, which address more than the pure act of viewing. Where his approach was formerly a negative and reductive one, it now becomes a positive one, in that new elements are admitted into the landscape. What Ruisdael painted up to this point for example the Great Beech Forest in the Haarlemmerhouthe could easily observe in the Dutch surroundings. Little by little, however, motifs make their entrance into the composition, which a Dutch landscape painter never could have seen. What seemingly happens here is a relapse into the composed landscape of the fteenth and sixteenth centuries. From Ruisdaels position, the last thing he intended was to stimulate a material interest in the beholder. We modern observers, however, who feel ourselves free of the intellectual preoccupations of Ruisdael and his Dutch contemporaries, sense something intentional in these motifs, which we nd alienating and disturbing. The change on Ruisdaels part which led himif we want to see it like thisdown a descending path is already evident in his famed woodland pictures, in which the trees are reected in the gloomy will-o-thewisp light of the eerie swamp water. The same tendency can be found in his waterfalls, whereby the fraught question of whether Ruisdael saw them in life or learned about them from Allaert van Everdingen appears entirely trivial. The nal extreme of Ruisdaels late, hyper-subjective attitudewhich approaches the sentimentalis signied in the Jewish Cemetery in the Dresden gallery (Figure 4). Here the activities of man are again granted an important place in nature. The activities, however, are essentially concerned with transience and are tied back to nature. Even the graves, dedicated to the perpetuation of the eeting individuality of man, are destroyed anew by nature and taken back into her lap. The gloomy thunderclouds and the regretful gesture of the tree at the rightwhich one might compare with the healthily stretching trunks of the Great Beech Forestare also elements that vigorously teach us that a specic interest has crept into purely attentive act of looking. This is an interest no longer called for by an objective given, but rather

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Figure 4 Jacob Isaacsz van Ruisdael, The Jewish Cemetery, 16551660. Gemldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany.

demanded by a heightened desire for feeling on the part of the creative and the beholding subject. This heightening of feeling into affect is a process that strains the most elevated mood andto the modern sensibilityturns into its opposite, the absence of mood. It had already been announced in some of the marine pictures and winter scenes that belong to earlier progressive periods of his development. By contrast, some pictures, whose originson the basis of their technique and composition, must be located in the second period, still display much of the captivating bal ance of atmosphere that characterizes the middle period. This is visible in, among others, the view of the weighing-house on the Dam Square in Amsterdam [Stadtwage am Dam] in the Berlin gallery (Figure 5). This is a city view, but a view from the inside, with any vegetal nature expelled. Only the atmosphere and the high cloud cover accord the work real balance. The weighing-house in the foreground looks at the beholder, and the gable-facades of the Damrak to the right and in the narrow side street on the leftso typical of Amsterdamcreate an attentive espalier. In the foreground we see the inevitable staffage by one of the minor painters close to Ruisdael: people standing alone or in groups, not in a shop or engaged in vigorous business, but watching, chatting, or attentively listening, a scene in which even the people appear felicitously attuned to the landscape.

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Figure 5 Jacob Isaacsz van Ruisdael, The Dam Square in Amsterdam, c.1670. Gemldegalerie, Berlin, Germany.

Translators Notes
1. To which Riegl dedicated an entire essay in the same journal only three years earlier. See Alois Riegl, Die Stimmung als Inhalt der Modernen Kunst, Die Graphischen Knste XXII (1899), pp. 4756. 2. See Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, introduction Wolfgang Kemp, translation Evelyn M. Kain (Santa Monica: Getty Research Institute Publications, 1999).