Whose pupil was Meindert Hobbema?
During Ruisdael's last period he began to depict mountain scenes, such as Mountainous and Wooded Landscape with a River, dateable to the late 1670s. This portrays a rugged range with the highest peak in the clouds. Ruisdael's subjects became unusually varied. The art historian Wolfgang Stechow identified thirteen themes within the Dutch Golden Age landscape genre, and Ruisdael's work encompasses all but two of them, excelling at most: forests, rivers, dunes and country roads, panoramas, imaginary landscapes, Scandinavian waterfalls, marines, beachscapes, winter scenes, town views, and nocturnes. Only the Italianate and foreign landscapes other than Scandinavian are absent from his oeuvre.The imaginary landscapes of gardens that Ruisdael painted in the 1670s actually reflect an ongoing discourse on the picturesque in circles of gardening aesthetes like Constantijn Huygens.
Slive finds it appropriate that a windmill is the subject of one of Ruisdael's most famous works. Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede, dated 1670, shows Wijk bij Duurstede, a riverside town about 20 kilometres (12 mi) from Utrecht, with a dominant cylindrical windmill. In this composition, Ruisdael united typical Dutch elements of low-lying land, water and expansive sky, so that they converge on the equally characteristic Dutch windmill. The painting's enduring popularity is evidenced by card sales in the Rijksmuseum, with the Windmill ranking third after Rembrandt's Night Watch and Vermeer's View of Delft. Windmills featured throughout Ruisdael's entire career.Various panoramic views of the Haarlem skyline and its bleaching grounds appear during this stage, a specific genre called Haerlempjes, with the clouds creating various gradations of alternating bands of light and shadow towards the horizon. The paintings are often dominated by Saint Bavo's Church, in which Ruisdael would one day be buried.While Amsterdam does feature in his work, it does so relatively rarely given that Ruisdael lived there for over 25 years. It does feature in his only known architectural subject, a drawing of the interior of the Old Church, as well as in views of the Dam, and the Panoramic view of the Amstel looking toward Amsterdam, one of Ruisdael's last paintings.Figures are introduced sparingly into Ruisdael's compositions, and are by this period rarely from his own hand but executed by various artists, including his pupil Meindert Hobbema, Nicolaes Berchem, Adriaen van de Velde, Philips Wouwerman, Jan Vonck, Thomas de Keyser, Gerard van Battum and Jan Lingelbach.
Ruisdael's