This is another one of those paintings that comes up a lot and I’ve never understood why, so I’d thought I’d look more into it. The rainbow on the left always stood out to me every time.

(view the full sized image here)

I gave identifying info about this work to Perplexity with the instructions to research it and tell me all the interesting things it could about the work. Here’s what we got:

The Jewish Cemetery: A Masterpiece Born from Tragedy and Hope

Known in Dutch as De Joodse Begraafplaats, Jacob van Ruisdael's haunting landscape painting captures one of the most dramatic and meaningful stories in art history. This monumental work, painted around 1654-1655, tells a tale that weaves together the flight of persecuted Jews, the genius of a young Mennonite artist, and the birth of a painting that would inspire generations of viewers with its profound meditation on life, death, and divine hope.

A Vision of Death and Resurrection

Picture this: a graveyard stretches before you, its marble tombstones gleaming white against the shadows of ancient ruins. Above, storm clouds gather in a tempestuous sky, yet through the darkness breaks a magnificent rainbow—a celestial promise piercing through the gloom. In the foreground, a massive dead birch tree gestures toward the tombs and heavenward, its bare branches reaching like skeletal fingers toward the divine light. Water rushes through the scene, symbolizing the relentless passage of time, while new growth emerges from the decay, promising renewal and eternal life.

This is the breathtaking vision that Jacob van Ruisdael created in his masterpiece, transforming a simple cemetery into one of the most powerful allegories of mortality and hope ever painted.

The Secret Story Behind the Tombs

The painting depicts Beth Haim, the Portuguese-Jewish cemetery in the village of Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, just outside Amsterdam. But the story behind this sacred ground reads like a thriller of religious persecution and miraculous survival. In the late 16th century, Portuguese Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition arrived in Amsterdam, carrying with them tales of torture chambers and burning stakes, having chosen banishment over forced conversion to Christianity.

These refugees, known as conversos—Jews who had been forced to convert but secretly maintained their faith—found sanctuary in the religiously tolerant Dutch Republic. Yet even in their new homeland, they faced restrictions. Initially forbidden from burying their dead near Amsterdam, they were forced to inter their loved ones in Groet, about 50 kilometers away, until they secretly purchased land in Ouderkerk in 1614.

The cemetery became the final resting place for some of the most remarkable figures of the age, including the tomb that Ruisdael highlighted with brilliant white light in his painting's center. This luminous marble mausoleum contains the remains of Eliahu Montalto, a Portuguese physician whose story itself reads like an epic of faith and royal intrigue.

The Physician Who Served Queens and Kings

Eliahu de Luna Montalto was born into a family of Marranos—Christianized Jews from Spain—in 1567. After studying medicine at the University of Salamanca, he openly returned to Judaism and became such a renowned physician that Maria de Medici, Queen of France, recruited him to the French court with the extraordinary condition that he could freely practice his Jewish faith. This was virtually unheard of in an era when Jews were banned from France and England for centuries.

When Montalto died suddenly in 1616 while attending the court at Tours, Queen Maria de Medici ordered his body to be embalmed—an exceptional honor—and personally funded its transport to Amsterdam for burial in Beth Haim. His tomb, inscribed in both Latin and Hebrew with the words "Eliahu Montalto physician to the Queen of France," became the luminous centerpiece of Ruisdael's painting.

A Young Artist's Revolutionary Vision

Jacob van Ruisdael was only about 26 years old when he created this masterpiece. Born in Haarlem in 1628 into a family of Mennonite painters, he was trained by his father Isaak and his uncle Salomon van Ruysdael. The young artist belonged to a Protestant religious minority that emphasized simplicity and spiritual contemplation, values that would profoundly influence his artistic vision.

In an era when religious art was declining in Protestant Netherlands, Ruisdael revolutionized landscape painting by infusing it with profound spiritual meaning. He transformed the vanitas tradition—typically found in still-life paintings featuring skulls, candles, and other symbols of mortality—into a landscape genre that could speak to the soul about life's deepest mysteries.

The Artistry of Allegorical Landscape

Ruisdael's genius lay in his ability to manipulate reality to create maximum emotional and spiritual impact. While the tombstones in his painting accurately depict the actual sarcophagi at Beth Haim, nearly everything else was his invention. The dramatic ruins that dominate the background were transported from the remains of Egmond Castle, forty kilometers away. The rushing stream that bisects the composition never existed at the real cemetery—Ruisdael added it as a traditional symbol of time's passage.

The painting's monumental scale—nearly twice the size of typical 17th-century landscapes—creates an overwhelming sense of the sublime that would later influence Romantic painters. Every element carries symbolic weight: the dead birch tree represents mortality, the ruins symbolize the impermanence of human achievement, the stormy clouds suggest life's trials, while the rainbow and new growth offer hope for redemption and eternal life.

The Technique of a Master

Working with oil on canvas, Ruisdael employed a rich palette of earth tones contrasted with brilliant whites and deep shadows to create his dramatic effects. His brushwork was both meticulous and bold—carefully rendering the texture of marble tombstones and crumbling masonry while applying thick impasto to capture the movement of clouds and the roughness of tree bark.

The composition leads the viewer's eye through the scene with masterful control, from the foreground's broken tree trunk, across the gleaming tombs, up to the architectural ruins, and finally to the turbulent sky where light breaks through darkness. This visual journey mirrors the spiritual journey from death to resurrection that forms the painting's central theme.

A Painting That Changed Art History

The Jewish Cemetery exists in two versions—the larger, more elaborate version in the Detroit Institute of Arts and a smaller version in Dresden. Both paintings established Ruisdael as one of the greatest landscape painters of all time and helped elevate landscape painting from a minor genre to one of the most profound forms of artistic expression.

The work's influence extended far beyond its own era. It inspired English Romantic painters like J.M.W. Turner, the French Barbizon school, and the American Hudson River School, all of whom found in Ruisdael's vision a model for landscapes that could express the sublime power of nature and the human soul's relationship to the divine.

A Mirror of the Golden Age

The painting emerged during the Dutch Golden Age, a period of unprecedented prosperity and cultural achievement in the Netherlands. This era of religious tolerance and economic expansion created the perfect conditions for artistic innovation, as wealthy merchants and civic leaders commissioned works that celebrated both their material success and their spiritual values.

Ruisdael's masterpiece perfectly captures this dual nature—celebrating the beauty of God's creation while acknowledging the transience of earthly life, honoring the memory of persecuted Jews while affirming the possibility of redemption and hope.

The Artist's Journey

Born into a family of landscape painters, Jacob van Ruisdael began painting at the remarkable age of 17, with his earliest dated works from 1646. He became a member of the Guild of St. Luke in Haarlem in 1648 and later moved to Amsterdam, where he became a citizen in 1659. Interestingly, he converted from his family's Mennonite faith to join the Reformed Church, though he later returned to the Mennonite community.

Despite his later fame, Ruisdael struggled financially during his lifetime and never married, devoting himself entirely to his art. He died in 1682 and was buried in St. Bavo's Church in Haarlem, the same church whose spire appears in many of his landscape paintings. His most famous pupil was Meindert Hobbema, who would continue his tradition of poetic landscape painting.

The Jewish Cemetery stands as Jacob van Ruisdael's greatest achievement—a painting that transforms a simple graveyard into a profound meditation on the human condition, where death and hope, tragedy and redemption, earthly sorrow and divine promise merge into one of the most moving artistic statements ever created. In its marble tombs and stormy skies, in its dead trees and living rainbow, we see not just a landscape, but a mirror of our own souls' journey through life toward eternity.

And that's it!

If you have any details you think Perplexity left out, reply to this email and I'll adjust my prompt to nudge it to include it next time.

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Thanks for reading!

-JP

Current prompt: I want you to create a newsletter post describing the fun and exciting stories around a painting. It should be a newsletter read for leisure and should be an enjoyable read (not just a list of facts) here's what you’re gonna do: Find the name of the following painting in its original language and any alternative names it goes by. Then Research the painting and give me blurb telling me all you can about the artist, the historical context/events it was created in, the style, the materials used, the composition and visual elements, the story/underlying message, what inspired the work/what it meant to the author, and whatever other info you find that helps give a complete understanding of the work. A description of what is depicted (mention subjects) should be the first thing, while the “biography” of the artist should be last. if the work has a lot of meaning behind it, then that is what the meat of the newsletter should be. Besides that you are free to present the information in a concise and captivating way, with the most interesting and novel stuff closest to the top. Order the presentation of information for which pieces have the most compelling and interesting story to tell. At least some of the description should be formatted like a story. [for example: a couple sits on a bench watching the sunset while a man next to them…]. ONLY include information that is for THIS SPECIFIC PAINTING. you will find info on paintings similar to this one but NOT this one. OMMIT INFO ABOUT SUCH PIECES. remember, the goal is to make the most compelling, intriguing, and fun to read newsletter as possible, so keep that above all else.