Journey through Landscape in Seventeenth-Century Holland

The sets of landscape etchings produced in the second decade of the seventeenth century by Claes Jansz. Visscher, Esaias van den Velde, Willem Buytewech, and Jan van de Velde drew on and contributed to a print culture that played a key role in defining "Dutch" landscape. Examination of these printed landscape series as part of a wide-ranging print culture underscores the consistent interrelationship of landscape, history, and politics. To varying degrees, the contemporaneous descriptive geographies, histories, allegorical tableaux, didactic prints, and poetic anthologies considered in this study provide parallels for the prints' serial structure, journey theme, and commemorative motifs. Moreover, as part of a wider enterprise of Dutch self-definition, they provide cultural guidelines for the interpretation of landscape in prints and paintings.

Levesque's study of the Dutch seventeenth-century experience of place is two-tiered. She addresses the journey through landscape as an interpretive framework, the spatial structure of knowledge, the benefits of travel from the point of view of humanists, and the growth of a Dutch national self-consciousness expressed through landscape. She also provides a close reading of the structure and motifs in the print series of Claes Jansz. Visscher, Esaias van den Velde, Willem Buytewech, and Jan van de Velde.

“Throughout this fascinating and well-illustrated volume Levesque holds rightly to her stated aims and argues convincingly for a more historically sensitive account of these works.”—Burlington Magazine

“This book is original, insightful scholarship of the highest quality that will prove of interest to a wide range of scholars of Dutch art, culture, and history. Professor Levesque makes a significant contribution to the debate that has developed over the last twenty years or so about the meaning of Dutch landscape in particular and Dutch realistic imagery in general.”—Lawrence O. Goedde, University of Virginia

Catherine Levesque is Associate Professor of Art History at Clark University

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