17th-century Dutch Seascape. Workshop Of Salomon Van Ruysdael

Oil on oak panel, one board Presented in a beautiful antique frame with reversed profile, in blackened wood with guilloché and checkerboard decorations in the center Total dimensions: 58 x 52 cm - The panel alone: 37 x 32 cm "Holland, this country where the sea is everywhere, what landscapes more striking than this intense port activity cradled in the northern light. It is quite naturally that painters direct their gaze towards the coast, the economic and social heart of a country which has dearly acquired its freedom and prides itself on its economic success. The Dutch, in the long war of liberation which opposed them to the kingdom of Spain, also won several naval victories which are exalted in painting and contribute greatly to the diffusion of navies. »This seascape, probably located in front of the city of Dordrecht, is meticulously composed, without precisely describing reality, but the essential is there. It is first of all a question of moving and transmitting a poetic vision full of melancholy of the painter's usual environment. It shows us an estuary with large sailing boats, some fishing boats floating on calm water. The very contrasting palette, remains in shades of gray, brown, white, allowing to be in harmony with the sky which is established on three-quarters of the painting.Salomon van Ruysdael (Naarden around 1602-Haarlem 1670) Uncle of Jacob van Ruisdael and father of Jacob Salomonsz van Ruisdael, born in Naarden, member of the Haarlem guild in 1626, died in the same city in 1670, Salomon van Ruysdael is, with his contemporary the Leidse Jan van Goyen, whose work presents a parallel development, is one of the first great Dutch landscape and marine painters. Like Van Goyen during his time in Haarlem, Ruysdael was most likely a student of Esaias van de Velde, whose discoveries he would amplify and bring to greater mastery. These elevate the landscape to the level of a genre—and a specifically Dutch genre—by ridding it of its historical and symbolic content, and distancing himself from the Flemish Mannerist tradition of the constructed landscape. Ruysdael left behind an abundant production of paintings; his winter landscapes recall, with more freedom, those of Esaias van de Velde: already, the anecdotal elements—hockey players, figures in sleighs, etc. —, inherited from Bruegel through the work of Avercamp, are subjected to the expression of the landscape and the rendering of the atmosphere. A little later, Ruysdael moved closer to the dune landscapes of Pieter Molyn and Pieter van Santvoort, one of the favorite themes of this first period of the Dutch landscape with panoramas and views of waterways. From 1631, he asserted the mastery of his style; his landscapes then present all the characteristics that one finds at the same time among the painters of still lifes and genre scenes of the Haarlem school: taste for the elongated format, sobriety of the composition simply formed by two horizontals, those of the water and the sky, which now occupies three-quarters of the painting, and finally concern for the expression of values, rather than color, literally dissolved in the light, which gives an overall gray-green monochrome. After 1640, his painting, unlike that of Van Goyen, shows a taste for more vivid tones, without losing the nuanced aspect and lightness of the technique of the "tonality" period: delicate pinks and blues of the skies, red and brown spots of the figures who become more numerous, while remaining perfectly integrated into the landscape. Ruysdael is, like his nephew Jacob van Ruisdael, a first-rate painter of skies... Beautifully preserved. Sold with invoice & certificate