NARRATOR: When he works behind the camera, cinematographer Gavin Finney tells stories by using film to capture movement. But what if you’re a seventeenth-century landscapist, Jacob van Ruisdael, and instead you have a paintbrush? Finney and curator Adam Eaker discuss.

ADAM EAKER: So he conveys the ordinariness of the Dutch landscape, and at the same time, he transfigures it through light—through the depiction of the sky—into something really dramatic and extraordinary.

GAVIN FINNEY: He’s picked the moment you’d want to press the shutter on a camera, which is this gap in the clouds illuminating the woman and the child. And they’re right on the edge of a shadow of a cloud. We know these clouds are moving. And in my mind, they’re moving towards us, and I think there’s a spotlight racing towards the viewer. And in the next second, the lady and the child will be in darkness.

NARRATOR: The painted scene, like a moving shot in a film, serves a larger story. It invites us to speculate.

GAVIN FINNEY: The man’s carrying a bag. They’re standing still, the woman and the child—so are they waiting for the man? He’s carrying a bag—has he come off a ship? Is he father, or brother, or husband? What’s the story here? It’s not just figures put in for scale; there’s a human narrative going on here as well, enveloped in this great landscape.

NARRATOR: On the far left, the landscape opens to the sea.

ADAM EAKER: I like to think that Ruisdael included this glimpse of the sea as a way of expanding the horizon—both literally and figuratively—to show a kind of interconnectedness between this humble path and some world outside the frame.

GAVIN FINNEY: When you stand in front of it, you can almost imagine it coming to life.