But, without attempting any chronological order, turn to _The Beach_ at the Hague Gallery, a replica of which, _Shore at Scheveningen_, is in the National Gallery, while there are others elsewhere. A cliff projects on the right; otherwise the water, dotted with wading figures and sail-boats, extends clear back from the front to a low horizon, above which is a sky piled and scattered with loose, buoyant clouds. There is wind in them, and it ruffles the long reaches of waves that glide in over the sand. Here is freedom not only of brushwork but of imagination, which has been stirred by the sense of vastness and of movement. The sea itself spreads far and is alive with briskness, but in the endless distance of the sky the clouds are moving grandly. This picture already gives the clue to Ruisdael’s fully developed genius. It prefigures his capacity to comprehend the big in nature; to go out to it and mingle with it; to find it, not in stupendous spectacles, but in the sense of vastness that even familiar scenes may convey to one who realizes and [Illustration: THE MILL NEAR WYK-BY-DUURSTEDE JACOB VAN RUISDAEL RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM] feels the bigness in nature everywhere about us. For compare _The Mill near Wyk-by-Duurstede_, Ruisdael’s masterpiece in the Rijks Museum. Familiar enough in Holland are the ingredients of this scene: gray water, gray lowering sky, olive-green, brown, and pale-buff ground and trees, a gleam of light on the body of the mill; yet with what a majesty of conception they are clothed! Everything is heightened and made poignantly compelling by a beautiful, tremendous dignity. Nor was it only under aspects of stirring movement that Ruisdael found bigness. He could find it in calm: witness _The Swamp in the Wood_, in St. Petersburg, and the _Oak Wood_ of the Berlin Gallery. In front, pale amber-green lily-pads, floating on depths of olive-green water, in the mingled light and shade of rich, somber golden-green and ruddy foliage; distant water and dunes, and over all a sky in which balloons of clouds hang drowsily. It recalls another masterpiece, this time of the Imperial Art-History Museum, Vienna, _The Big Wood_. Again a clump of oaks and a shattered silver birch, massed high and wide against a sky of wonderful luminosity. Everything is simplicity itself, yet expresses magisterial authority. The amplitude of conception on this occasion has no trace of stress or poignancy, nor is it one of calm; it is buoyant with a glorious joyousness.