There is a tendency to identify Jacob van Ruisdael too exclusively with his pictures of mountainous scenery and rocky waterfalls; hence to speak of him as a romantic painter. But the true Ruisdael must be sought elsewhere. These romantic subjects belong to his latest period, in the seventies, when the indifference shown by the public to his own manner had induced him to imitate that of Everdingen’s Swedish landscape, and of the pictures of Swiss scenery by Roghman and Hackaert. How superior he was to Everdingen, we have already noticed[F] in comparing the examples of these two men that hang close together in the Munich Pinakothek. Ruisdael’s knowledge of and feeling for form, his power of construction not only of the details but also of the ensemble, his mastery of sky and cloud effects, and, above all, his individual and powerful personality combine to produce in these scenes of wild solitude with their plunging cataracts a suggestion as of great organ music, beside which Everdingen’s pictures have only the tinkle of picturesqueness. Yet while Ruisdael, as was to be expected, was superior to Everdingen, he is in these pictures inferior to himself. That his health was failing may possibly account for it; that he painted on dark grounds and the black has in many cases come through and dulled the resonance of the colors, overdarkening the shadows, is another reason; but the chief one is to be found in his changed attitude. He was no longer drawing his inspiration direct from nature itself. The finer examples of his latest style, such as the _Landscape with Waterfall_ of the National Gallery, still exhibit his power in rendering the movement and the mass of water, while others are impregnated with that solitary grandeur which was a characteristic quality of his genius. But it is in these instances touched with moroseness, with something possibly of the sentimental sorrows of a Werther. The great artist, whose lonely bachelor life had been spent in meditating upon the bigness of nature, was now brooding over the littleness of the world’s appreciation of himself; introspection had taken the place of that large looking out upon the world which hitherto had been the habit of his life. These romantic subjects, in fact, represent the waning of his powers; for the complete revelation of his genius we must look elsewhere, beyond the invented landscapes, to those in which nature itself has inspired the mood which dominates its interpretation. Meanwhile let us glance at the brief facts of the artist’s life. He was born in Haarlem, in 1628 or 1629, the son of a picture-frame maker, and nephew of Salomon van Ruisdael, who was probably his teacher. At about the age of twenty he was enrolled in the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke. Some years later he settled in Amsterdam and was admitted to the rights of citizenship. [Illustration: OAK-WOOD JACOB VAN RUISDAEL THE BERLIN GALLERY]