User:Se7enteen-century/The Jewish Cemetery

The Jewish Cemetery is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael, now at the Detroit Institute of Arts. While growing up in Haarlem, his father, Isaak van Ruisdael, and uncle Salomon van Ruisdael taught him painting. Jacob van Ruisdael painted an allegorical painting depicting hope and death in The Jewish Cemetery. Located on Amsterdam's outskirts, it is a prominent resting place for Amsterdam's large Jewish Portuguese community. These tomb monuments commemorate the leaders of the newly arrived Portuguese-Jewish community. The central elements of the painting, however, are different from how Ouderkerk appears to achieve the painting's compositional and allegorical intent. This painting is twice as large as the typical landscape painting from the 17th century. After being cataloged in England in 1835, the artwork, The Jewish Cemetery, disappeared. The Detroit Institution of Art acquired the painting in 1920 after rediscovering it in London.

Jacob van Ruisdael painted two versions of The Jewish Cemetery in 1653 and 1655 and was said to be in his mid-twenties, according to Erich Simon.

Subject and Symbols
In his painting, Jacob van Ruisdael transforms the cemetery into a landscape variant of a vanitas painting. In still-life paintings, skulls, books, flowers, and candles are common subjects in this theme. Similarly, Jacob van Ruisdael used deserted tombs, ravaged churches, stormy clouds, dead trees, changing skies, and flowing water to symbolize death and the transience of all earthly things. The building foundations are overrun by leafy foliage arising from decaying wood in the foreground. In the artwork, there are many symbols of death. As the brook rushes over large stones under the broken arch, it symbolizes life's fast-flowing flow. Similarly, it corresponds to light beams that break through billowing rain or storm clouds in the upper sphere. The upright but broken column, here presented as a half-cylinder, signifies death. In addition to serving as a memento mori, a reminder of death's inevitability, the painting also contains themes of hope and renewal. Water constantly flows, changes, and regenerates in the stream, symbolizing life while the decaying tree bending over it represents death's inevitable arrival. Although the rainbow has many meanings, it is generally regarded as a symbol of hope and divine promise. At the top of the picture, the curve in the rainbow arc, is like a bridge to the heavens. Nature revitalizes and replenishes neglected areas as they become submerged in encroaching woodland over time.

Tombs
In the illuminated white marble tombstone, adorned with a large stone box and colorful cap, lie the remains of Elias (or Eliahu) Montalto. Dr. Eliahu Montalto's first name is spelled out in an acrostic poem on the vertical rear plate. Inscribed on the marble slab are Hebrew block letters. In the painting, David Farrar's grave is barely visible behind Montalto's tomb; it has a simple headpiece and a plain stone slab. In the sarcophagus next to Montalto there is a carved cover made of red marble that covers Issac Uziel grave; the tomb is adorned with a veil of red-speckled marble, indeed of symbolic significance. Alongside him, the largest tomb of the group, lies Abraham Israel Mendez. A dark tomb with a half-cylindrical column erected on top of the graves in the far left corner of the painting, separated from the other graves by a rushing stream and a broken, fallen bridge-like tree, is dedicated to Abraham Franco Mendes o Velho (the old one), the first Portuguese settlers in Amsterdam at the time. In the painting, Jacob van Ruisdael located the black stone tomb on the left edge. However, the original position was placed in front of the three caskets; this was done precisely for composition and coloration. His tomb appears to be significant as Jacob van Ruisdael signed the horizontally lying half-column that crowned his grave. In the center of the composition, a pair of white tombs flanked by three mourners, a Jewish family, including a father, mother, and boy dressed in black, are reflected in the middle distance by the lids of two elongated pyramids.

Location and Context
On the outskirts of Amsterdam is the village of Ouderkerk; a cemetery called Beth Haim (House of Life) lies by the Amstel River. The subject matter of Jacob van Ruisdael's painting The Jewish Cemetery. David Henrique De Castro was the first to connect the marble tomb in Dresden cemetery to the Portuguese-Jewish cemetery in Ouderkerk near Amsterdam. The cemetery is a prominent resting place for Amsterdam's large Jewish Portuguese community. The site was also visited by other artists, including Rembrandt. In the Ouderkerk steeple with its decorative knob-like projections, Rembrandt was struck by its unusual beauty. It was Frits Lugt who discovered this structure in Rembrandt's pen and ink drawing. Jacob van Ruisdael made sketches that demonstrate an awareness of the surroundings early in his career. During his trip to Ouderkerk, he was still living with his father in Haarlem; at that time, Ouderkerk had a small Jewish community; Haarlem was the first city in Holland to allow Jews to practice openly. Following the fall of Granada in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella granted full power to the Inquisition, which drove Jews from Spain, leading to the arrival of Portuguese-Jewish refugees in Amsterdam around 1590. In Amsterdam, many Portuguese Jews reverted to Judaism after generations of being forced to live as Catholics in Iberia. Since its founding in 1614, the year Jews became officially religiously free, the Jewish Cemetery in Ouderkerk has buried Sephardic refugees who fled the Inquisition from Spain and Portugal. The Jewish Cemetery was emblematic of Jews' freedom in Amsterdam.

In contrast, many of the central elements depicted in the painting do not represent how Ouderkerk really looks, including the church ruins; there was neither a castle nor church on the ground, nor a small timber building nearby, nor any hills or rushing streams, all of which Jacob van Ruisdael imagined. Only the tombs in Beth Haim Cemetery are similar to the one in the painting, as they are real tombs and can be seen on Ouderkerk just as they are shown in the painting. The drawing of the ruined remains of Egmond aan den Hoef Castle were depicted in his Dresden painting. In the Detroit version, it contains what was left of the Romanesque Abbey of Egmond Binnen, near Alkmaar. The Romanesque Abbey was sacrificed during the Dutch revolt against Spain over 80 years before he painted it. Landscape artists like Jacob van Ruisdael selected representative sites of the republic, such as ruins, windmills, and city views, to illustrate Dutch patriotism. In his Haarlem studio, he added additional landscape elements. To achieve compositional and allegorical goals, these elements were incorporated into the scene. These features are found in sketches Jacob van Ruisdael made at other locations, but do not appear in the Ouderkerk landscape.

Provenance
The painting, The Jewish Cemetery, vanished some time after it was cataloged in England in 1835. In 1920, the painting was rediscovered in London before being acquired by the Detroit Institution of Art. In Dresden, there was another version of the same composition. A potential third painting, a panel, appeared in Rotterdam at an auction on October 11, 1855. Its current location, however, remains unknown. The Teyler Museum in Haarlem, Amsterdam, also houses two sketches of the cemetery. Both drawings are rigorously topographical, without figures, and stylistically equivalent. Similar to Detroit and Dresden paintings, the tombs are realistically depicted. It is unknown if the paintings were commissioned or who their early owners were. As the Detroit painting dates back only to 1739, it is not known who its first owner may have been. However, Montalto's white illuminated marble tomb appears prominently in both paintings. Therefore, Jacob van Ruisdael might have been commissioned to paint it by a member of his family. There is also a possibility that he was merely exploring the dramatic aspects of a landscape.