Rijksmuseum: Thoughts on Dutch Landscape Painting

Today I took an unscheduled trip to the Netherlands to visit my friend Abram—and to visit Amsterdam, where I'd never been. Not technically a Roman city, although that doesn't stop them from writing "SPQA" (Senatus Popolusque Amstelodamensis) on their buildings. But anyway, Abram was in class in the morning, so I went to the Rijksmuseum to look at Dutch art.

The Netherlands is a place particularly bound to its landscape. As land, the Low Countries were largely manufactured, dredged up out of the sea. With land barely above the waterline, the sea continues to be all-pervading—not least in Amsterdam where it flows freely between the streets in canals. Seafaring, particularly in the Dutch golden age of the 17th century, was definitional of Dutchness; but so too is the conquest of land, the raising of cities from the seabed.


Distant View with Cottages along a Road, Philips Koninck, 1655.
     This painting balances city and landscape seamlessly; in a world where both are the product of human intervention, both exist in the same plane. They are on a level with one another—quite literally, given the legendary flatness of Holland, which this painting makes quite evident. While the line between sky and not-sky is clear, buildings and trees blend in palette and in form—each grows into the other. The path that runs through the foreground is the meeting-point of the houses on the left with the scrubby hillock on the right; the man who has crossed this path and now sits fishing by the pond unifies all three. And of course, water threads the entire flatscape, with obligatory boats calling to mind the ocean landscape that, in the Netherlands, is present even when absent.


Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters, Hendrick Avercamp, 1608.
     A landscape of a different sort: now we see from inside the city into a possibly infinite distance. This is the organized landscape of the Dutch winter; with boats frozen into the ice, roaming must be foregone for home life. Thus the landscape shrinks, and the green planes and estuaries visible in the above painting become only distant possibilities, irrelevant—thus the faraway in this Winter Landscape is cloaked in fog, as impenetrable as the ice underfoot. It is as if the ground curls up and around at the back, becoming the blanched sky and sealing the community in for the cold months.


Landscape with a Stone Bridge, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1638.
     This Rembrandt has an almost mystical quality. Its movement is from bottom left—where everyday activities take their course—up to the tree burning with sunlight, whose sprawling channel of energy dissipates into the top-right corner of sky, where blue and cloud dissolve into a shimmering dark-orange and black mass of unknown potential. This composition anticipates much later Romantic techniques from Germany, participating in a similar reverence of the natural—trees and sky especially. Yet a Dutch quality is nevertheless evident here—nature here does not seem to threaten, as it so often does in, say, a Caspar David Friedrich; rather, it exists alongside the pathways of human activity. At most, it is indifferent.


The Dutch Ambassador on his Way to Isfahan, Jan Baptist Weenix, 1659.
     Perhaps this painting provides a useful counterpoint. Here, the movement of the painting is also from left to right, but in a very different way: this motion is inherent to the subject of the painting, which is a retinue moving from a harbor inland to the Safavid capital of Isfahan. The Dutch ambassador of the title is robed in gold; accompanied by a Persian counterpart, he is about to enter the extremely dark forest that borders the painting at right. In other words, he is leaving behind the familiar Dutch landscape of the sea, and traveling into that which is unknown, perhaps even dangerous—the foreign forest, capped with stormclouds. 


Landscape with an Episode from the Conquest of America, Jan Jansz Mostaert, 1535.
     A landscape still more alien to Dutchness is this "American" landscape, depicting—in theory—the Spanish conquest of their New World empire. What defines this vista is not its reality—in fact, it is a total fiction of the painter's imagination, who had never visited the continent. Rather, it is defined as purely "Not-Holland": its looming mountains, Dr. Seuss-like rock formations, exotic animals (find the parrot), and red plants serve principally to unmoor the viewer from any sense of Dutch familiarity. As we drift into the strange, we see more clearly the horizon we are leaving behind; the artist's idea of a Dutch landscape is made clear through his idea of a foreign one.


View of Olinda, Brazil, Frans Jansz Post, 1662.
    On a similar note: here the balance of city and countryside, finely-struck in the first painting above, is at risk: the creeping vegetation and strange animals at front threaten to overrun the painting; the building, a Spanish church taken by the Dutch, threatens to fall still deeper into ruin, and to recede still further from the field of view. Nature might soon become the only subject of the tableau. But of course, this is not the Netherlands: it is Brazil, another American anti-type.

The Trading Post of the Dutch East India Company in Hooghly, Bengal, Hendrik van Schuylenburgh, 1665.
     Here, a foreign landscape brought under Dutch control—in this case, the Hooghly region of what is now India. One thing is immediately evident: it is flat; the landscape has been suitably organized for Dutch goings-on (not least sailing, at left). But this idea is different from the harmonious one of the Koninck with which we began; here there is a wall that clearly separates "nature" (or what is left of it) from the "city" (which, here, is little more than a marketplace).


The Entrance to the Park of Saint-Cloud, Paris, Pieter Rudolph Kleijn, 1809. 
     Finally, another other for the Netherlands: France. This was in fact painted during the Napoleonic occupation of the Low Countries, one year before Napoleon annexed Benelux directly to France. I sense in this painting a critique. The natural landscape here is not natural at all—it has been carefully curated for bourgeois enjoyment. The three visitors and the massive trees stare each other down over a forbidding abandoned territory—it is a scene of confrontation. The visitors seem to be kept separate from "nature" by the landscape(ing) of the modern city; their realms do not meet, even in shadow. There is something absurd going on here—a construction of landscape that fails to connect, that is not sewn up properly and thus tears open, spills over into misalignment.