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Jacob van Ruisdael was one of the most significant landscapists of the seventeenth century, the Golden Age of Dutch art. He created several "icons" in the field, whose message goes far beyond the beauty and poetry of the landscape panorama and the objective, topographical rendering of excerpts from nature to take on symbolic force.
This is especially true of his superb Landscape with a View of Haarlem. From the elevated position of the dunes to the northwest of Haarlem, the eye catches sight of the red-tinged roofs of the town, the mighty structure of Saint Bavo and the other churches, the town hall and, at the edge of the town, the many windmills on the ramparts. The cloudy sky, reaching up from a low horizon, is reflected in the flat countryside in the interplay of strips of light and shadow. Long linen cloths are spread out to bleach on the meadows in the foreground - at the time of the painting linen manufacture was an important industry of the town. Ruisdael accorded the bleaching of linen an important place in nearly all his 'Haarlempjes', about 20 of which have survived.
Allegorical interpretations of Landscape with a View of Haarlem, which go beyond the topographical and refer to the virtue of the purity of the soul, cannot be excluded. Goethe had already characterized Ruisdael as a 'poet' and admired the 'perfect symbolism' in his works. The combination of a composition drawing on nature and an ambitious statement in terms of content is indeed one of the most important stylistic features of Ruisdael, in whose art Dutch landscape painting of the 17th century reached its impressive peak.
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