Close Encounters of the Museum Kind

Perhaps the most striking quality of Dutch landscape painting of the seventeenth century is its seeming realism, especially when compared to older landscapes. Flemish landscapes of the sixteenth century (Patenir) had been full of obvious artifice: a conventional brown foreground, green middle ground, and blue background, with fantastic rocks, peopled by hermits and saints, framed by trees on either side like a stage set. Italian landscape of the seventeenth century (Claude) is likewise very beautiful, but not at all like nature: landscapes bathed in golden light, with classical buildings, peopled by figures from mythology. Dutch painters of the seventeenth century usually did without all these artificial trappings and attempted to give an impression of the real world around them, although they themselves developed their own set of subtle artistic conventions. Painters in early seventeenth century Haarlem like Esaias van de Velde, Pieter de Molijn, Pieter van Santvoort, and Salamon van ...