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Your galleryLandscape with a Church by a Torrent
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- Where does your eye go next?
- What would you ask about this work?
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Look at how the foaming rapids and rocks fill the foreground between you and the church, and find the cut logs lying on the bank.
Nothing written in Ruisdael’s lifetime explains how he or his buyers understood his landscapes. Still, the rapids that cut off the way to the church, and the felled logs on the bank, can suggest how short life is and how hard the road to salvation. The painting was seized by the Nazis from the Rothschild family in Vienna, returned to the family in 1946 and came to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1962.
oil on canvas · Framed: 100.3 x 83.8 x 10.8 cm · Cleveland Museum of Art · Dutch Golden Age
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Landscape with a Church by a Torrent
- Artist
- Jacob van Ruisdael (Dutch, 1628/29–1682)
- Date
- c. 1670
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- Framed: 100.3 x 83.8 x 10.8 cm (39 1/2 x 33 x 4 1/4 in.); Unframed: 71 x 55.2 cm (27 15/16 x 21 3/4 in.)
- Credit line
- Bequest of Jane Taft Ingalls
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Cleveland Museum of Art
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.