Tiepolo and Ruisdael at London galleries

Like his Dutch coastguards besieged by waves, Ruisdael disdained histrionics in his snow-scenes. Over the whitened branches of a sparse avenue, snow-clouds arc, caught in the sunset, in the snowscape of c. 1675 (Frankfurt Kunstinstitut). Through the illusory and inhospitable arcade thus created stroll inquisitive villagers, bent upon viewing the foggy outline of St Bavo's Church in Haarlem, distant across the fields. A dog leaps through the snow, in spite of his chilled paws, intent on joining his master. Another snowscape of the same period is a sober celebration of the amenity of Winter, even out of doors (private collection, Massachusetts). On a canal beside two silent windmills, among boats frozen into the water, an early game of ice-hockey warms the players. The grim, vaporous sky promises no merriment. The players must provide that for themselves. The dour tonalities of grey, white and sulphuric brown, almost akin to those of Ruisdael's childhood acquaintance van Goyen, certainly lack the multicoloured hilarity of Avercamp's skating scenes. In his Wordsworthian contemplation of Nature, Ruisdael may have lacked humour.

Towards the end of his career, Ruisdael's vision was haunted by waterfalls; not floods or rapids, but the surges of rivers over slopes and rocks, which could be observed even in north Holland and along the Westphalian border, such as the waterfall which pelts and hurtles past a castle-crag in his landscape of c. 1665 (Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts). No name could be more suitable than Ruisdael, or Rushing Valley, for this master of lunging billows of water, gale-driven sweeps of cloud, wind-whipped sails and the liberated and vitalising, light-pouring swell of the air.

Donald Bruce, author of Radical Dr Smollett and Topics of Restoration Comedy, taught English Literature at Westfield College in the University of London for twenty-five years.

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