The Jewish Cemetery at Ouderkerk

Jacob van Ruisdael is considered the most important Dutch landscape painter of the seventeenth century, and The Jewish Cemetery at Ouderkerk is his best-known work. Purchased for use by the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish congregation in Amsterdam in 1641, the cemetery holds twenty-eight thousand graves and includes many notable figures, including the publisher Menasseh Ben Israel and the parents of Baruch Spinoza. Van Ruisdael’s painting, an allegory of death and renewal, does not closely resemble the actual cemetery: the church ruins, stream, and other details were invented by the artist. He had no known association with the Portuguese Jewish community.