Description

These nine small, rectangular etchings (from a series of ten) feature the local landscape, people, monuments, and ruins surrounding Haarlem, a city located about ten miles from Amsterdam. The first print in Van de Velde’s series, designated as the title page, is an exception. It depicts a round, colonnaded Roman temple overrun with vegetation and set in a hilly, Italianate landscape. People stroll or ride on horseback through the idyllic terrain. The remaining eight prints offer panoramic views of the distinctly Dutch countryside. Van de Velde uses a wide range of graphic techniques to create vividly detailed, naturalistic images of the local landscape, with its low horizon, vast sky, meandering roads, and tranquil waterways. The insertion of motifs such as grazing cows, dogs, travelers, rustic buildings, and footbridges helps to guide the viewer’s eye through each scene and enhances the realistic appearance.


Context and Analysis

Van de Velde’s series highlights the key role played by Haarlem printmakers in the development of the Dutch landscape as a popular pictorial subject in the 1600s. He built upon the work of his predecessors, Hendrick Goltzius and Claes Jansz. Visscher, who had previously produced sets of prints depicting the local landscape. Such series allowed viewers to flip through consecutive, recognizable views and take a virtual stroll through the countryside. The dunes, wooded areas, and broad fields around Haarlem provided a welcome respite from city life and became a destination for tourists seeking leisure activities in the 1600s. Van de Velde was a noted landscape painter as well as printmaker, and this environment inspired him and his pupil, Jan van Goyen, to paint the earliest naturalistic Dutch landscapes.

The intimacy, simplicity, and realism of Van de Velde’s etched landscapes captured the local topography in an unprecedented way. These images helped to shape Dutch national and cultural identity following the Dutch Revolt against Spain. The representation of the local landscape as an independent, celebrated subject underscored the regeneration of Haarlem’s land and prosperity in the years following the Spanish siege of the city in 1572–73. Visual references to the Dutch Revolt and its aftermath appear throughout Van de Velde’s series. For example, the third etching depicts the church in the town of Spaarnwoude, which had been damaged and only partially rebuilt at the time Van de Velde made this print. In the eighth etching, a man’s body hangs from the gallows. Van de Velde’s juxtaposition of ruined buildings and death with evidence of renewal and prosperity, in the form of labor, travel, and courtship, undoubtedly would have resonated with early viewers for whom the memory of the revolt was still fresh. Aspects of Dutch history, geography, transportation, industry, and local memory are embedded in Van de Velde’s seemingly straightforward, picturesque scenes.

Written by Nadia Baadj

Bibliography

Freedberg, David. Dutch Landscape Prints of the Seventeenth Century. London: British Museum Publications, 1980.

Gibson, Walter S. Pleasant Places: The Rustic Landscape from Bruegel to Ruisdael. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Keyes, George S., Esaias van den Velde, 1587–1630. Doornspijk: Davaco, 1984, 51–54; 320–34.

Levesque, Catherine. “Haarlem Landscapes and Ruins: Nature Transformed.” In Time and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, ed. Susan D. Kuretsky. Poughkeepsie, NY: Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, 2005, 49–62.

Levesque, Catherine. Journey through Landscape in Seventeenth-century Holland: The Haarlem Print Series and Dutch Identity. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.