Low Waterfall in a Wooded Landscape with a Dead Beech Tree (c. 1660–70): Art, History and Details

Low Waterfall in a Wooded Landscape with a Dead Beech Tree (c. 1660–70) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jacob van Ruisdael (Dutch, 1628/29–1682).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Jutting from a dune in the foreground, the massive silvery trunk of a dead tree leads the eye across a waterfall and toward a distant sunlit field where travelers and a dog traverse a sandy path. Partly masked by trees, a ruined building is turned gold by the sun. In Jacob van Ruisdael’s landscapes, dead trees, waterfalls, and ruined buildings were visual expressions of the passage of time. Ruisdael devoted equal attention to the cloud-filled skies looming above the land, creating dramatic patterns of light and shadow and revealing the unseen movements of the wind.

Object facts

• Title: Low Waterfall in a Wooded Landscape with a Dead Beech Tree
• Date: c. 1660–70
• Creator attribution: Jacob van Ruisdael (Dutch, 1628/29–1682)
• Culture: Netherlands
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 123 x 157 x 9.5 cm (48 7/16 x 61 13/16 x 3 3/4 in.); Unframed: 99.2 x 131 cm (39 1/16 x 51 9/16 in.)
• Collection: P - Netherlandish-Dutch
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1967.63

A detail from the museum

Jacob van Ruisdael was inspired by trees in various states of decay, observed from nature.

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Hofstede de Groot, C. P. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century. London, United Kingdom: Macmillan and Co, 1908.
• Rosenberg, Jakob. Jacob van Ruisdael. Berlin, Germany: B. Cassirer, 1928.
• Simon, Kurt Erich. Jacob van Ruisdael; eine Darstellung seiner Entwicklung. Berlin, Germany: Würfel Verlag, 1930.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.