Focus on The Jewish Cemetery and analyze the Subject and symbols.
In both versions, Jacob van Ruisdael presents the cemetery as a landscape variant of a vanitas painting. Vanitas works tend to be still-life or genre scenes, with skulls, books, flowers, and candles as common subjects in this theme. Similarly, Jacob van Ruisdael employed deserted tombs, ravaged churches, stormy clouds, dead trees, changing skies, and flowing water to symbolize death and the transience of all earthly things. Jacob Rosenberg and Seymour Slive describe the "compelling and tragic mood in nature" of the Jewish Cemetery—"a moralizing landscape .... painted with a deliberate allegorical programme."The central building's foundations are overrun by leafy foliage arising from decaying wood in the foreground. Beyond, many likely symbols of death prevail. As the brook rushes over large stones under the broken arch, possibly symbolizing the fast-flowing passage of a human lifetime. That may correspond to beams of  light that break through billowing rain or storm clouds in the upper sphere. The upright but broken column—here presented as a half-cylinder—likely  signifies death. In addition to serving as a memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of death, the painting may also offer themes of hope and renewal. Water constantly flows, changes, and regenerates in the stream, perhaps symbolizing life and aliveness while the decaying tree bending over it represents death's inevitable arrival. Nature revitalizes and replenishes neglected areas as they become submerged in encroaching woodland over time. Although a rainbow bear varied symbolic meanings, it often been regarded as a harbinger of hope and divine promise. At the top of the picture, the curve in the rainbow's arc may suggest a "bridge to the heavens." It has also been theorized to symbolize the renewal of life, connecting the work to a theological message: rabbis have said that the resurrection of the dead would be the first sign that the moshiach (the anointed one from the House of David) would be coming. This message would have been clear to Portuguese Sephardi, who would wait for this event from within Beth Chaim. It is possible that this added meaning would have been at the direction of a patron, though it is unknown who, if anyone, might have commissioned the painting.
anointed Jacob van Ruisdael genre moshiach Vanitas still-life House of David memento mori vanitas Sephardi column