One of the foremost in this group is Jan van Goyen, who was already receiving training in painting as a 10-year-old; he came to Haarlem around 1616 and there laid the foundation for his incomparable knowledge of painting. He knew how to present the finest variations of light of the mist rising from the sea and the land and to paint the fog coating the landscape, sometimes with a bright golden tone and sometimes with a soft silver one. After his journey to Belgium, he first worked in Leyden and then in the Hague from 1632, developing a range of work that seldom waned, and left behind a comprehensive collection of paintings always imbued with light and spirited fast fluid brush strokes. These are mostly river and sand landscapes with lonely huts, with peasants who enliven village streets on foot or on horseback, with fishermen, seamen and similar figures. But his works also included views of the larger cities such as Arnhem, Dordrecht and Nijmegen, whose walls and towers are mirrored in the sunlit streams.
Another pupil of Van de Velde was Salomon van Ruisdael who had been strongly influenced by Jan van Goyen. Although Ruisdael performed some noteworthy work with his portrayals of villages, farmyards, rivers and canal landscapes, he was later surpassed by his nephew Jacob van Ruisdael. In 1648 this younger painter became a member of the Haarlem Painters’ Guild and then worked from 1656 in Amsterdam. Jacob van Ruisdael was not only the greatest of all Dutch landscape painters, but also greatly influenced the work of the Romantics.
If Van Goyen was the poet of light and atmosphere, then Jacob van Ruisdael was a profound poet who sometimes raised the serious fundamental tone of his landscapes to an extremely tragic ambience. In this he adhered strictly to nature, which he sought in the oak woods, rocky crags or waterfalls of the landscape. Only sometimes did his imagination change nature slightly, when on his way through the mountains and forests in neighbouring Germany he composed foaming waterfalls such as Waterfall by Schlossberg. Also the Jewish Graveyard (late seventeenth century) can be seen as a type of high level poetry in which the gravestones of the tombs of the Amsterdam Jews are depicted. From these and other pictures, Goethe was inspired to write his essay Ruisdael as Poet. That Ruisdael pictured nature faithfully and without any fanciful additions is witnessed, for example, in The Hunt or the Landscape with Oak Wood (both second third of the seventeenth century). Despite his great knowledge and untiring keenness – he left around 460 paintings behind – Ruisdael died in a Haarlem poorhouse.
Van Ruisdael obtained his knowledge of waterfalls from Allart van Everdingen, who had travelled to Sweden and Norway in 1644 and mainly painted Scandinavian mountain pictures. Everdingen had been a pupil of the Flemish painter Roelandt Savery, who painted in the style of Jan Brueghel, who had spent some time in the Tyrol, and took over his manner of painting mountainous landscapes. Everdingen had been in Haarlem since 1645 and then active in Amsterdam from 1652 and here painted only serious, gloomy, grey-brown mountain landscapes with wild valleys and ravines with mighty waterfalls, as well as crags covered with only a few firs and mountain lakes. His speciality was the waterfalls between rocks and firs like in Norwegian Waterfall, which must have seemed at the time like a completely new revelation.
One must also include Aert van der Neer among the great Dutch landscapists; we know little about him except that he came from the little town of Gorinchem. Art historians are unsure as to where he learned his skill with colour. He painted Dutch villages on wooded rivers and canal banks in warm daylight or by moonlight in works such as the Moonlit Landscape with Windmill (1657). Occasionally there were also winter landscapes showing the happy celebrations of people on the ice. His specialty was moonlit landscapes, and this was further developed and matured in the nineteenth century by a large number of painters. Aert van den Neer had absolutely no success with his fellow countrymen, so that he finally had to become an innkeeper in order to survive; unfortunately, this venture was not lucrative, and he died in stark poverty.
Meindert Hobbema from Amsterdam picked another specialized area. He seems to have been a pupil of Ruisdael and specialized in the painting of water mills such as Village with Water Mill (late seventeenth century). His pictures were later sold, especially by the English who had a good supply of them, for substantially higher prices than those of Ruisdael. But in his lifetime Hobbema could also hardly live off of his pictures, because after 1668 he only seldom painted and earned his bread as supervisor at the Amsterdam oil and wine market.