Der Damplatz zu Amsterdam

Ruisdael left Haarlem for Amsterdam in 1657 and lived near the Dam square, taking a house on the square itself, on its south side, in 1670; the museum observes that from there he must have had roughly the view this picture records. He worked chiefly as a landscape painter and turned to the townscape comparatively late, in the years of his growing liking for large forms, and it is a poetic mood picture rather than a topographically exact record: the museum notes that he altered proportions from an earlier drawing of the Damrak now in Brussels. He signed the canvas at the lower left, “JvRuisdal.” Catalogued in Berlin as inventory 885D, the painting was bought in 1874 with the collection of the Aachen banker Barthold Suermondt. It is held in the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.