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Dutch painting in the 17th century is characterised by the multitude of genres in which individual painters specialised. Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael, the painter of this impressive work, is one of the most important, most versatile and most productive landscape painters of the second half of the century.
Ruisdael painted many variations on this theme, a Nordic mountain landscape with rushing waterfall. In his choice of subject matter, he was influenced by Allaert van Everdingen, another landscape painter. Unlike the latter, however, Ruisdael had never been to Scandinavia, and so his paintings were based not so much on studies from nature as on van Everdingen's example and his own powers of imagination.
Yet what the viewer encounters in Ruisdael's painting is not merely an apparent representation of the visible in a seemingly realistic snapshot; his imposing, often vertical compositions also have a spiritual dimension in their symbolic reference to the transient. The apparent realism becomes an instrument for a deeper level of meaning. The passage of human life might be compared with the powerful waterfall, plunging downwards over the rocky steps. The constant flow of foaming water over craggy stone formations offers an allegory of human life as ceaseless struggle, and suggests its transience. Alongside this moral and dialectical purpose is a poetical element deriving from the heroic aspect of the subject matter and the dramatic opposition of light and shade, the theatrical contrast of the lighting creating its own specific atmosphere.
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