RUISDAEL, Jacob Isaackszon van
(b. ca. 1628, Haarlem, d. 1682, Amsterdam)

View of Bentheim Castle from the North-West

c. 1652
Oil on panel, 52 x 68 cm
Private collection

Ruisdael's views of Bentheim Castle are perhaps his most famous works. Some sixteen of them survive, and they form a largely cohesive group of works in which the greatest of all Dutch landscape painters reveals an almost obsessive fascination with this memorable subject.

Bentheim, a small town clustered round the foot of a hill dominated by a large castle after which it is named, is in Westphalia in Germany, about six miles from the border with the Netherlands. When Ruisdael visited it, almost certainly in 1650, and probably accompanied by his townsman Nicolaes Berchem, the town was no more than a few scattered houses on the lower slopes of the hill partly covered in oaks, but the castle was very much as it is today, dominating the surrounding plain. Travelling east from the province of North Holland, this is the first proper hill that Ruisdael would have encountered, made all the more dramatic by the fortified Schloß on its crown, and it is hardly surprising that it should have made such an impact on the young painter. The lowland landscapes, rivers, watermills and woods and the distinctive timber-framed buildings that Ruisdael saw in the Dutch province of Gelderland on his way to and from Bentheim served as the inspiration for much of his work in the ensuing years, and Ruisdael drew on them for the rest of his career.

Ruisdael's characteristic response to Bentheim was to adapt what he had seen and drawn, and to recreate landscapes that are completely plausible but not topographically accurate. Ruisdael consistently exaggerates the height and steepness of the hill of Bentheim, his purpose in doing so is to show the castle atop its sandstone outcrop, dominating the viewer and towering over him.