Esaias van de Velde: Winter Landscape

Esaias van de Velde, Winter Landscape 1623, National Gallery, London. 

Esaias van de Velde (1587-1630) is surely one of the most significant figures in the whole of Western art, since it was he, more than any other, who pioneered a new realism in landscape painting. Esaias was born in Amsterdam in 1587, the son of Hans van de Velde, a painter who had immigrated to Holland from Flanders. Upon the death of Hans in 1610, Esaias and his mother moved to Haarlem, where Esaias joined the artists’ guild in 1612. In 1618 Esaias moved to The Hague, seat of the Stadtholder (the head of the Dutch Republic), presumably to increase his earnings potential, and died at The Hague from unknown causes in 1630, at the age of only 43 (Keyes, Esaias van de Velde 11-13). So little is known of his life, but he lives through his paintings. His art depicts a variety of subjects – landscapes, “merry company” scenes, cavalry skirmishes, travellers attacked by bandits – but all show figures in a landscape.

As with most of Esaias’s works, nothing is known about the early history of his Winter Landscape in the National Gallery. It was auctioned by Sotheby’s in 1956 for an anonymous seller, and bought by a commercial gallery called Slatter’s, who sold it to the National Gallery the following year (McLaren 446). The painting is on an oak panel, signed and dated “E V Velde 1623”. The painting is easily overlooked because of its small size, but is an important work by Esaias. It is an early painting in the new “realist” style, yet contains memories of the older Flemish manner, and it also anticipates the “tonal” style which became important in the 1630s. “Realism” is a problematic concept, but is such a useful term that it is difficult to do without it.

In Esaias’s Winter Landscape we see a winding path upon which a few travellers are walking, to lead our eye into the composition. To the left there is a farmhouse, surrounded by trees to protect it from the wind, and some figures playing kolf. Kolf was a game using a stick to strike a ball, but unlike modern golf, the aim was to hit a target, not get the ball into a hole. To the right, across some frozen fields, we see trees and buildings on the distant horizon, including a prominent square tower. At first sight, the painting might not seem particularly exciting or innovatory, but its true novelty is revealed if we compare it with a more typical winter landscape of the period, also in the National Gallery, a small Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle by Hendrick Avercamp (1585-1634), who was an almost exact contemporary of Esaias. 

Hendrick Avercamp,Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle, National Gallery, London

The most noticeable difference is that Avercamp’s painting has a circular format, called a tondo, though it has to be said that Esaias himself sometimes used a tondo format for smaller paintings. Avercamp’s painting shows extensive snow on the roofs of the buildings and ice on the ground for his figures to skate on. By contrast, the painting by Esaias shows only small traces of snow, and this in itself was a highly original development – a winter scene with hardly any snow. Esaias’s painting depicts a day in, perhaps, February, when the sky is almost cloudless, the trees are bare, and the forms of nature are sharply defined by the coldness of the air. This sensitivity to nuances of weather and atmosphere is a key element in Esaias’s realism. In the painting by Avercamp, the tree in the foreground and the castle in the background act as framing devices, with the skaters placed between them. Avercamp is a sort of journalist in paint. The varying costumes worn by his figures place them firmly in different social classes, and the figures engage in a variety of actions: skating on the ice, putting on skates, throwing snowballs, and riding in a sledge. By contrast, Esaias employs just a few figures and concentrates more on the surrounding landscape. Esaias’s figures help to animate the scene and also give a sense of scale. They have a family resemblance to the country people who populate the paintings of Pieter Bruegel (1525/30-1569) and we can identify with them as they trudge through the cold winter landscape. Avercamp’s big tree, with its decorative pattern of branches, his fairy-tale castle, and his dainty little people are all indebted to “artificial” Flemish conventions, although none the worse for that. By contrast, Esaias’s painting is austere and simple, the kind of scene we might actually encounter on a walk through the countryside. This new realism was possibly rather risky, as customers tend to be conservative in their tastes and might well have preferred to buy a more traditional work by an artist like Avercamp. It is important that Esaias’s Winter Landscape is very small in size, which meant that he had the freedom to be experimental. His larger paintings are often more conventional and closer to the style of Avercamp.

In Avercamp’s Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle we are looking down on the scene from a high vantage point. This means there is a high horizon, reduced space for the sky, and more space for the skaters. But in Esaias’s Winter Landscape we are looking at the scene from a low vantage point, which means more space for the sky and less space for the figures. Thus Esaias brings us closer to the scene, the level we would be at if we were there in reality. The expanse of sky, with a few flying birds to emphasise the vastness of space, became a key feature of Dutch landscape painting. The low vantage point also allows distant buildings and trees to be highlighted on the horizon, the way we would see them in reality. This use of a prominent horizon had already been pioneered by Esaias in his View of Zierikzee, which depicts the town’s buildings viewed against the skyline from across the river. As Svetlana Alpers points out, Esaias has here anticipated Vermeer’s View of Delft, and this way of viewing a town in profile derives ultimately from views of towns in the cartouches of maps (Alpers 152-156). Maps were sometimes hung on walls as interior decoration, and there can hardly be a more significant commitment to realism than a map. 

Esaias van de Velde, View of Zierikzee, Gemaldegalerie, Berlin

Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft, Mauritshuis, The Hague

 On the horizon of Esaias’s Winter Landscape in the National Gallery we see a square tower, which acts as a distant focal point, rather like the Church of Saint Bavo seen on the horizon of the views of Haarlem by Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/9-1682). Could Esaias’s tower likewise be intended to represent a real building? Dutch landscapes were usually composite pictures using elements taken from different sources, but they often contained local topographical details to increase the painting’s saleability. A square tower without a roof suggests that it could either be the ruin of a castle or the ruin of a church without its steeple. Esaias was living at The Hague when he painted the Winter Landscape, and a possible candidate is the ruin of Eykenduynen Chapel near The Hague, which had been partially demolished in 1580 (De Groot 21). This was depicted in an etching by Esaias’s colleague, Willem Buytewech (1591/2-1624), who was known as “Geestige Willem” (Witty William). However that may be, the inclusion of a ruin of any kind adds meaning to the painting, because it suggests the passing of time and the transience of life, rather like the “vanitas” symbols of mortality found so often in Dutch still lifes. For example, skulls and flowers.

Esaias’s Winter Landscape hangs on its own in the National Gallery, but it is likely that it once had a companion painting of Summer, long since lost. In the early seventeenth century, series paintings of the Months of the Year and the Four Seasons were declining in popularity, but it was still very common to paint small-scale Summer and Winter scenes as pairs. A Summer and a Winter by Esaias are recorded in the 1639 inventory of a painter called Cornelis Cornelisz (Bengtsson 24). The 1627 inventory of paintings owned by Frans de Block, an Amsterdam wool merchant, lists “een winter ende somer van Esias” (a winter and a summer by Esaias) and “noch een winter ende somer van de selve” (another winter and summer by the same) (Frick Collection, Montias Database). In addition, two of Esaias’s earliest known works are a Summer and a Winter, both painted around 1612-13. The Summer includes figures of Jesus and two disciples on the road to Emmaus, while the Winter includes Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus on their “flight into Egypt”. In his later landscapes, Esaias abandoned the use of such religious figures, another indication of his growing commitment to realism, and perhaps also indicating that there was less demand for religious subject matter in landscapes.

Although we can tentatively say that Esaias’s art is “realistic”, at least in comparison with Avercamp, this does not mean that he gives us a kind of snapshot of reality. Rudi Fuchs defines realistic landscape as consisting of “the low viewpoint, the wide spaces, the horizon, the sky, the little figures as spacial points of reference” (Fuchs 105) – all of which are found in Esaias’s Winter Landscape in the National Gallery. But these features are themselves a convention, because they are not the only angle from which we could view a landscape. Esaias does not usually depict an actual location. Instead, he takes elements from different sources - often motifs from his sketchbooks of drawings - and blends them into a new whole. As David Freedberg says, Esaias’s art is a mixture of “the topographic and the pictorial” (Freedberg 29). The term “schilderagtig” (meaning painterly or picturesque) was a term of praise in the seventeenth century (Goedde 136). In his Winter Landscape in the National Gallery, Esaias does not simply depict a scene, he also seeks to shape our response to it. The farmhouse is old and weather-beaten, which somehow makes it more picturesque. The countryside is a place for leisure – the kolf players – and nobody is depicted working. The travellers on the road are not just “spacial points of reference” but figures we can identify with as they walk through the landscape towards the distant village, almost as though they are on a journey through life. And as Catherine Levesque has shown, the naturalistic depiction of Dutch scenery, both in prints and paintings, was a way of demonstrating a patriotic pride in the beauty of one’s homeland, which had now been liberated from Spain after a long war.

The Winter Landscape’s casual, everyday, and yet also poetic quality is reflected in Esaias’s painting technique, which is light and sketchy, but at the same time delicate and precise. Technical analysis by David Bomford and Melanie Gifford has revealed that the work was completed in five rapid stages (Bomford 45-56). First, the oak panel was covered with a thin undercoat, which was allowed to dry, and then the sky was added. Next, the panel was covered with a detailed charcoal sketch of the landscape, which was then painted. In the final stage, the figures were lightly added in black and then coloured. As Melanie Gifford has shown, this was a rapid and innovatory technique which dispensed with the elaborate layers of underpainting used by earlier artists such as the Mannerists and the Flemings. The new realism in landscape style brought about by artists like Esaias was accompanied by a new lightness of touch, and “the change in style [away from earlier artistic practices] was accomplished by deliberate changes in painting technique” (Gifford “Style and Technique” 146). A comparison can be made with the French Impressionists, who likewise pioneered a lighter painting technique for a new painting style. The Impressionists dispensed with the layers of underpainting used by academic Salon painters and replaced this with a more spontaneous method.

The National Gallery conservators have used infrared photography to reveal that beneath the paint of Esaias’s Winter Landscape there is a detailed charcoal underdrawing which can be considered a work of art in its own right. As George Keyes points out, drawing was an important aspect of Esaias’s realism because, unlike painting materials, drawing implements could be taken out of doors and used in front of the subject (Keyes “Esaias van de Velde and the Chalk Sketch” 140). Esaias was one of the first artists to make black chalk sketches from nature, and three of his sketchbooks survive. These chalk sketches would have provided a source of ideas for underdrawings in charcoal, upon the wooden panel, and the landscapes would then have been painted on top of that. The chalk sketches were also used as preliminary ideas for etchings.

Esaias’s etching of a Winter Landscape has a close affinity with his painted Winter Landscape in the National Gallery. The composition of both is quite similar, and both depict an old farmhouse, leafless trees, small figures, a wide sky and distant horizon, all seen from a low viewpoint. This etching is thought to have been made about three years before the painting, which suggests that Esaias used etching as an experimental medium, before transferring his motifs to painting. 

Esaias van de Velde, Dune Landscape, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 

With the Dune Landscape of 1629, painted the year before he died, Esaias returns to the inspiration of his younger years, but with a painting of even greater simplicity and power. A landscape of dunes is typical Haarlem scenery, as any tourist to Holland can confirm, and one wonders if Esaias sometimes travelled back to Haarlem and marketed his work there. In Dune Landscape he continues with the low horizon and large sky that we saw in the National Gallery Winter Landscape. But this time there are no buildings, there is just one large tree boldly highlighted against the sky, and the number of figures is reduced, so that the only prominent figure is the hunter with his dog. The sky is restless and patches of dune are illuminated by sunshine which falls through gaps in the clouds. There is a very restricted use of colour, which is mainly limited to shades of brown and blue. Esaias has here created his first fully tonal painting.

Paintings of such restricted tonality allowed artists to convey effects of light, atmosphere and weather. So it can be argued that the tonal phase of Dutch landscape was the next logical step for realism. For example, an overall greyness, often seen in the paintings of Esaias’s pupil Van Goyen, admirably conveys the effect of a rainy day. However, it has been argued that the tonal manner, with its limited colour range and sketchy technique, was primarily a response to economic recession, resulting from the resumption of the war with Spain. It meant that artists had to use cheaper pigments and make their paintings smaller in size and lower in price (Israel 465-467). This in turn was advantageous for them, because it meant that they could work more quickly and produce a larger number of works (Montias “The Influence of Economic Factors on Style” 49-57).  Be that as it may, the flight away from bright colours can also be seen in areas linked to aesthetics rather than to economics. For example, the most highly prized tulip flowers were whitish, with delicate streaks of colour, and the most popular Chinese porcelain had just two colours, blue and white, the inspiration of the famous Delftware. The painterly technique of the tonalists is extremely beautiful, a distant ancestor of Impressionism, and must have appealed to the aesthetic sense of the purchasers - the same kind of people who appreciated the impressionistic technique of Frans Hals, who was later admired by Manet, Van Gogh and Whistler.

Camille Pissarro, Fox Hill, Upper Norwood, National Gallery, London 

It is instructive to compare the Winter Landscape by Esaias with the winter landscape of Fox Hill, Upper Norwood by Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), painted nearly 250 years later. Of course, Pissarro’s painting has some obvious differences. It may have been painted out of doors, it records an actual place, and the shadows on the snow have a blueish tinge, a typical Impressionist touch. But what we notice most are not the differences but the similarities. Both paintings have a low viewpoint, wide expanse of sky, trees and buildings against the sky, small figures on a road to lead our eye into the composition, a loose painting technique, muted colours, a winter scene, but with little snow. Comparison of these two paintings reveals what a “modern” artist Esaias really was. He jettisoned the trappings of Flemish and Italianate art to create a more naturalistic vision, close to our own way of seeing the world. 

Works Cited

Alpers, Svetlana, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art of the Seventeenth-Century (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1983)

Bengtsson, Ake, Studies on the Rise of Realistic Landscape Painting in Holland 1610-1625 (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1952)

Bomford, David, “Techniques of the Early Dutch Landscape Painters” in Christopher Brown, and others, Dutch Landscape, the Early Years: Haarlem and Amsterdam 1590-1650 (London: National Gallery, 1986)

De Groot, Irene, Landscape Etchings by the Dutch Masters of the Seventeenth Century (Maarsen, Netherlands, 1979)

Freedberg, David, Dutch Landscape Prints (London: British Museum, 1980) 

Frick Collection, New York, The Montias Database of 17th Century Dutch Art Inventories http://research.frick.org/montias/home.php This website gives the texts of 1,280 Amsterdam art inventories, in the original 17th-century Dutch.

Fuchs, R. H., Dutch Painting (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978)

Israel, Jonathan, “Adjusting to Hard Times: Dutch Art During Its Period of Crisis and Restructuring” in Art History, Vol.20, 1997, pp.449-476

Gifford, E. Melanie,“Style and Technique in Dutch Landscape Painting in the 1620s” in The Getty Conservation Institute, Historical Painting Techniques, Materials and Studio Practice (Leiden: University of Leiden, 1995). The complete text is on Google Books.

Goedde, Lawrence O., “Naturalism as Convention: Subject, Style and Self-Consciousness in Dutch Landscape” in Wayne Franits (editor), Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997)

Keyes, George S., Esaias van de Velde 1587-1630 (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1984)

------- “Esaias van de Velde and the Chalk Sketch”, Nederlandsche Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, Vol.38, Issue 1, 1987, pp.136-145

Levesque, Catherine, Journey Through Landscape in Seventeenth-Century Holland: The Haarlem Print Series and Dutch Identity (Pennsylvania State UP, 1994)

McClaren, Neil, The Dutch School 1600-1900, revised by Christopher Brown, 2 Vols. (London: National Gallery, 1994)

Montias, John M., Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982)