A wooded river landscape with a waterfall, a church and farm beyond

With more than 150 extant examples, landscapes with waterfalls, torrents and rushing streams form the single largest category of Jacob van Ruisdael’s existing paintings. Providing an accurate chronology for these works is problematic, as only one dated example – whose date has variously been read as ‘1664’ and ‘1667’ (see Slive, op. cit., no. 200) – is known. Despite their verisimilitude, Ruisdael himself would never have personally encountered the powerful waterfalls that cascade over huge boulders and large trees in these mountainous landscapes. He would instead have been informed by the works of artists like Allart van Everdingen, who popularised these motifs following a trip made to southeastern Norway and western Sweden in 1644.

Ruisdael’s earliest depictions of waterfalls, which can provisionally be dated to the early to mid-1650s, do not employ notably Scandinavian topographies. Only in the late 1650s and 1660s, after Ruisdael (and van Everdingen) had relocated from Haarlem to Amsterdam, do such works begin to appear. Seymour Slive has proposed that this painting is probably ‘a bit earlier’ than the thematically similar painting depicting a church on a mound above a falls in the Cleveland Museum of Art, which he dates to the first half of the 1670s (see Slive, op. cit., no. 170).

A note on the provenance:
Jakob Goldschmidt (1882-1955) was one of the most significant art collectors of his time in Germany. His vaunted, curated collection spanned from major French Impressionist and post-Impressionist art, through Old Master paintings, medieval and Renaissance art, decorative arts and porcelain. A prominent leader in the banking, finance and business worlds, notably as co-founder of the Danat bank, German-Jewish Goldschmidt became an early focal hate-figure for the National Socialists during their ascendancy to power. He fled Germany in 1933, emigrating to New York in 1936. Cut off from funds in Germany, subject to the restrictive National Socialist tax regulations and enmeshed in complex financial arrangements, Goldschmidt was reliant on family and connections for support. Although able to take part of his collection including the porcelain out of Germany, much of his art was sold via auction in Germany between 1936 and 1941, including property forcibly forfeited to the Reich.

Walter Rappolt (1898-1998) was part of a multi-generational family firm Rappolt & Söhne, the Hamburg-based manufacturers of ‘Eres’ raincoats, whose company building on Mönckebergstrasse in the ‘Altstadt’ is still known as the ‘Rappolthaus’. He was also part of a Jewish family who made a significant contribution to the city’s intellectual life as donors to the Hamburgische Wissenschaftliche Stiftung. However, following the Nazi party coming to power, the business was ‘aryanised’ and, as victims of the regime, many family members did not survive the war.

Walter and his wife Hildegard fled Hamburg in 1936 for Nottingham, where a branch of the firm had been previously established, albeit under strict and onerous conditions imposed by the German tax authorities, and where he was later joined by brother Hans and his wife Ada. With his second wife, Gertrude (‘Didi), Walter, settled in England, collected portrait miniatures.