Among his pupils at this period was Meindert Hobbema. At the age of fifty-three he returned to his native city, broken in health and without means of subsistence, and through the intervention of some friends of the Mennonite faith was given refuge in the poorhouse. Here he lingered a few months and died in 1682, one more example among so many in the story of Dutch painting of an artist dying in poverty. This is the ugly side of the story. In telling it we have tried to do justice to the part played by the young republic, out of whose hard-won nationality a great school of artists grew; but at the same time we have not overlooked the quick decadence of national and social spirit that followed upon the attainment of political liberty. And of this sapping of the morality of the people the indifference paid to her great artists was not the least notable symptom. Ruisdael’s youth and the prime of his manhood were spent in studying the wooded dunes, open country, seashore, and large stretches of water in the neighborhood of Haarlem and Amsterdam. These supplied the subjects for his finest and most characteristic pictures, while others suggest that he traveled in different parts of Holland and even penetrated into the neighboring German principality of Münster, a hilly country with forests and old castles: witness _Castle Bentheim_ of the Dresden Gallery. The dated pictures are comparatively rare and belong chiefly to Ruisdael’s earliest period, but it is possible to assign approximate dates to many later ones through examination of the figures which were introduced by other artists. As Bode points out, those to which Adriaen van Ostade, Nicolaes Berchem, and Wouwerman contributed may with much probability be assigned to the Haarlem period, which terminated about 1655; on the other hand, when, among the Amsterdam artists, Adriaen van de Velde was his collaborator, the picture must antedate that artist’s death in 1672. Like all the greatest artists of landscape, Ruisdael was a close student of form, his drawings and etchings being often so conscientious in treatment as to suggest that he was something of a botanist. At any rate, few men have shown a more thorough knowledge of trees, their character of bulk and build, their branch-growths and manner of leafage, while the same constructive sense appears in his delineation of ground, rocks, water, and in that final test of great landscape-painting, the comprehension and rendering of skies. In his earlier work this preoccupation with form results in an excess of detail and a considerable tightness and hardness of method, as may be observed in the little _Village in the Wood_ of the Dresden Gallery.