There are two states of the four large plates, and many of the _Three Oaks_ and the _Cornfield_. As the later states are by far the more common, it is well to be warned that the plates have been retouched, and, in the writer’s opinion, certainly not by Ruisdael. In the first three a pudding-shaped cloud, with hard, bulging edges (what a satire on this consummate master of clouds!) has been inserted, and in all there is fresh work, sometimes adding to the effect of the plate, but still suggesting an alien hand. Ruisdael’s etching is little more than an illustration of his painting; criticism, therefore, of the one must deal to a certain extent with the other. Ruisdael’s great fame rests, perhaps, as much on his historical importance as on his actual merit. With Hobbema he prepared the way for Crome and Constable, and through them for Rousseau and the landscape of modern France. But, taken on his own merits, he is a considerable figure. Were it not for the fatiguing series of unpersuasive waterfalls, which too often represent him, his real qualities would have more chance of making themselves felt. When on his own ground he is [Illustration: _Fig. 17.--The Cornfield. By J. Ruisdael. B. 5._] more various, more subtle, altogether finer than Hobbema, except when Hobbema is at his very best, as in the severely charming _Avenue of Middleharnis_. Hobbema often fails to convince, because he has not sufficiently felt his subject; and so he will paint a grand sky with the wind moving great clouds across it, but when he comes to the trees of his foreground he forgets his sky, and paints the branches in a breathlessly stiff atmosphere, without the suggestion of a wind. The resulting effect is a perplexing heaviness. Ruisdael betrays the same defect in his later pictures; what else could one expect from one condemned to produce unrealities for a market? But in his good period he always shows an impressible imagination, and his materials are fused by the feeling in which he steeps them. His sense for the beauty of trees is profound, though rather limited in its range. He was lacking in the consummate style of Crome, and would never have achieved the largeness and reticent power of a picture like the English master’s _Avenue at Chapel Fields_. But for skies, for clouds, he has an eye more true, a love more comprehensive, than those of any who had gone before him, than those of many who were to follow him. He piles his clouds in mountainous glory, “trailing” their shadows over the wide country, till the level pastures of Holland grow in “visionary majesties” like the grandest mountains of Norway. This gives us all the more reason to deplore the absence of any attempt to deal with clouds in the etchings, still more the presence of those inflated shapes inserted by a stupid publisher. VII