Dutch Landscapes
30 April 2010 – 9 January 2011; The Queen’s Gallery, Edinburgh

Everybody likes a good landscape, with its ability to transport you from a room with four walls to a vast, thundery glen, or to a babbling brook on a summer’s day. Landscapes are a standard feature of modern urban life, as is the desire to escape to the country to refresh body and soul.

This wasn’t always so. Not until the 17th century, when the Dutch made landscape painting their own, did the world really accept the genre as legitimate in its own right. In fact the very word landscape comes from the Dutch, landschap, originally meaning a patch of cultivated land.

While not all critics have appreciated Dutch landscapes through the years (John Ruskin thought them “so totally for evil” that they should all be burned), it’s fortunate for us that George IV developed a taste for them, buying 34 when Prince Regent. These form the core of an exhibition of 42 paintings from the Royal Collection, opening at the Queen’s Gallery on 30 April.

When considering Dutch landscape, it’s important to understand what land means to the people of the Netherlands. A significant portion of the country is man-made, won from the sea in a never-ending battle of pumping and drainage. From 1590 to 1650 the Northern peninsula was increased by a third, in an impressive feat of collective determination.

The Netherlands was a young country in the 17th century, recently independent from Spain. The century saw a Golden Age, not just culturally but financially too – the modern stock-market had its beginnings in Rotterdam, and the Low Countries were the epicentre of international trade. As Daniel Defoe put it, the Dutch bought from the world “that they may supply all the World again”.

Enjoying this degree of success during the European era of the Baroque, with all the sensuous extravagance that entailed, you would expect the Dutch painter’s brush to drip with opulent excess, but of course it didn’t. Famously, Dutch painters of the Golden Age were modest, true to reality, and unprepossessing.

Landscapes, for the rest of Europe, were a theatrical backdrop to acts of mythical and biblical heroism played out by carefully arranged, colourful figures. Dutch painters of the 17th century inherited a more detailed, topographical instinct from their Flemish forebears, but still, that had been highly stylized, a spectacular bird’s eye view spread out over the land.

What came next was, in true Dutch style, quietly revolutionary. The vantage point was brought down to earth, the theatrical figures replaced with contemporary peasants or travellers, and the high horizon brought low so that the big, open sky filled the frame. Humble dunes, rivers and woodlands were put centre-stage; in Simon Schama’s words, “Landscape had become a world of sand, mud and weed.”

This was the land that people knew. Often just a few miles from the city gates, it was the rural retreat enjoyed by city burghers exercising the latest fashion for country walks. There were the ordered fields and windmills on the coast, and the wild, inhospitable zigzags of the old, inland dunes. There were wintry scenes of ice-skating, and moonlit woods.

Some painters tried their hand at a variety of these subjects (Jacob van Ruisdael was among the most versatile), but many stuck to what they knew best. Not only was landscape itself a specialisation, but artists tended to specialise within it: In 1678 poet and painter Samuel van Hoogstraeten joked that a specialist in cypress trees, when asked to paint a shipwreck by one of its survivors, asked whether his client would like a cypress in his “sad sea-accident”.

Marine painting was higher up in the hierarchy, even in the Netherlands, than lowly landscape painting. The sea loomed large in every aspect of Dutch life: it was a constant threat to those who lived below sea-level; it was the site of their vast trading enterprise (in 1670 the Dutch owned half of European shipping); and it was where their many wars had taken place.

In the 1620s, the tonal style found its way into Dutch painting. It wasn’t a favourite of George IV’s, but today it is considered one of the Golden Age’s greatest innovations. Outlines are blurred; sky, sea and land unified, moisture palpable in the air. Marine painting was a perfect candidate for this style, and one of those by Willem van de Velde the Younger caused Turner later to say, “Ah! That made me a painter”.

Turner was, like many classically trained artists before and after him, inspired by his travels to Rome. Many Dutch landscape painters made the pilgrimage too, though few stayed for long, and the impact Rome made on them was not universally positive. Several took up with a bawdy fraternity later banned by the Pope for its heretical behaviour. The “Bamboccianti”, like Johannes Lingelbach, chose to paint the modern-day squalor of the city, with its indolent inhabitants, rather than the romantic ruins of the past.

Others introduced Italianate aspects into their Dutch landscapes, filling them with imaginary mountains and golden light. Jan Both spent time in Rome with Claude Lorrain (who sneaks cheekily into the exhibition on that basis) and the influence of the Frenchman’s warm evening light is clear on Both’s biblical scene.

The significance of Both’s painting is spelled out in its title and narrative, making it easy to interpret. But the majority of Dutch landscapes present a greater challenge to critics looking for meaning: they seem simply to exist, with elements apparently scattered at random, and figures involved in no great operatic feats. It is as if you, the viewer, are on a rambling excursion and have happened on this time and place without rhyme or reason.

The paintings sold cheaply in their day, and two thirds of Dutch people owned one. It has taken the art world time to place a value on these works, but gradually, it has. These are not just pleasant little landscapes: they are a quiet revolution.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 18.04.10