According to Arnold Houbraken, Ruysdael was the son of a woodworker who specialized in making fancy ebony frames for mirrors and paintings.[2] His father sent his sons, Jacob and Salomon, to learn Latin and medicine, and they both became landscape painters, specializing in ruis-daal, or trickling water through a dale, after their name.[2] Jacob was registered with the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke and signed his paintings, while Salomon signed them much less often and was not a member for several years.[2] Houbraken wrote that Salomon invented a way of creating sculpted ornaments that when they were polished, looked like polished marble.[2] These were quite popular as a decoration on chests and picture frames, until the secret of their manufacture was discovered and widely copied.[2]