A waterfall is all motion and noise, and a painting has neither. Painters in China, Japan, Europe and America have taken on the subject for about a thousand years anyway. Some built falls they had probably never seen, from a friend's sketches or from old poems, and one canvas that drew crowds in New York was mocked for leaving out the roar.
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How These Were Chosen
Of everything in a landscape, a waterfall is the part that moves fastest and makes the most noise. A picture is silent and still. So every painter who takes it on has to decide what will stand in for the movement and the roar.
A waterfall also has no fixed size. The same drop can fill a canvas or shrink to a white line on a mountainside, and a few small figures beside it are enough to give a whole scene its height.
Each work below gives the falling water a real job, even where it is small in the frame, and each solves the problem of silence in its own way. In China and Japan, famous falls also came with poems and shrines, and the painters had those to answer too.
12. Jacob van Ruisdael, Landscape with Waterfall (about 1668)
In the middle of a wide canvas, a torrent drops over a shelf of rock and churns white below. Gnarled trees and bare dead trunks crowd the near bank, a church tower closes the view in the distance, and a few people stand so small that the eye nearly misses them. Jacob van Ruisdael painted it around 1668. The surprise is where he painted it: in Holland, a country with no mountains.
Falls like this one belong to Scandinavia, and there is no record that Ruisdael ever traveled there. The rock and the water came to him secondhand, through his friend Allart van Everdingen, a painter who had made the trip in 1644 and brought home drawings of Nordic mountains and waterfalls.
From those drawings Ruisdael built a subject of his own. He took up the motif in the late 1650s and went on painting such falls in numbers, each one assembled at home from another man's sketches.
The trees were a different matter. Dead wood was easy to find and draw in Holland, so Ruisdael could study it for himself, and the barren trunks in the foreground stand out more sharply than the rock behind them.
Against that stillness, the water carries all the movement. The trunks have stopped growing, the people have shrunk to specks and the distant tower stands fixed, so the only thing that changes from one moment to the next is the torrent pouring through the middle.
At a Glance
Artist: Jacob van Ruisdael (1628 or 1629 to 1682), Dutch
Painted: around 1668
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 142.5 × 196 cm (56.1 × 77.2 in)
Where to see it: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
11. Shen Zhou, Lofty Mount Lu (1467)
Near the top of a tall hanging scroll, a waterfall plunges down a cliff, and by the time it reaches the bottom it has lost most of its force. Below it a small man stands looking up, among pines, hanging vines, bare trees, a pavilion and a plank bridge.
Shen Zhou, a scholar painter of the Ming dynasty, made it in 1467 with one particular man in mind, and the mountain he chose, the lines he wrote on it and even the oddly gentle water were all meant for him.