From Goltzius to Rembrandt: landscapes of change in seventeenth-century Dutch prints and drawings
Embargo Date
2026-12-06
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
This dissertation investigates how early seventeenth-century Dutch artists graphically engaged with the local environment during a period of unprecedented landscape change. I argue that pioneers in rustic landscape imagery who were active in Haarlem and Amsterdam, including Hendrick Goltzius, Claes Jansz Visscher, Jacob Matham, Hendrick Avercamp, and later, Rembrandt van Rijn, variously acknowledged and sought to stabilize local environmental precarity through innovation and adaption of existing techniques, motifs, and visual formats at a time when the local landscape tradition in the Northern Netherlands was still taking shape. The diversity and multivocality of image types that this dissertation examines reference Dutch artists’ familiarity with concurrent developments in cartography that visualized Europeans’ expanding knowledge of the world. They also articulate contemporary engagement with an environment that was not a homogenous, static, or isolated entity, as traditional interpretations of Dutch landscape imagery have often suggested, but one with varied environs and fluctuating contours that were shaped by natural cycles and global weather systems. Chapter one considers how graphic landscape images of the local countryside variously engage the early modern concept of Diligentia in their subject matter and making, inviting the viewer to consider the interplay between the diligence, attention, and care required to produce graphic landscape imagery and to maintain the local environment. Chapter two considers how leading printmakers Jan Saenredam and Claes Jansz Visscher articulate their concern for representing ephemeral natural processes, such as erosion, rising sea levels, and shifting currents within two ambitious and relatively large-scale prints of the local coast. Chapter three explores how the onset of the Little Ice Age and Dutch voyages to the Far North shaped the production and reception of Dutch winter landscape imagery by examining works by Hendrick Avercamp and Rembrandt, two innovators in the winter landscape genre. Analysis of graphic representations of the local countryside, coastline, and the winter landscape demonstrates how Dutch artists articulated a range of associations with which contemporary viewers regarded their coastal environs, from anxiety and uncertainty to nostalgia and pleasure, while also providing a platform for viewers to imagine and discuss contemporary environmental change.