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  Home>Stories>Painting Climate Change in the 17th Century
      

      
      Search Art & Society Painting Climate Change in the 17th Century min read
 The world has warmed by more than one degree Celsius since the late 19th century, and it is on course to warm by another two degrees by the end of this century. The combination of the speed, likely magnitude, and human cause of this global warming make it unprecedented in the history of our species. Yet this is not the first time Earth’s climate has changed. In the 13th century, the climate of the Northern Hemisphere started to cool due to natural causes. Although cooling varied over time and from place to place, in general it persisted for several centuries. This period is commonly referred to as the Little Ice Age. Global temperatures declined by just a few tenths of a degree Celsius—significantly less dramatic a change than our current warming trend. Nevertheless, regional effects were often severe, including catastrophic droughts, torrential rains, and entire years in which winter never fully gave way to spring and summer.
 several blue and orange vertical stripes varying in darkness with darker ones representing extreme cold or warm temperatures
      
        
        Global temperature anomalies over the past 2,000 years. Dark blue indicates the coolest temperatures, while dark red indicates the warmest. The Little Ice Age (which can be dated to approximately 1250–1850) is outlined at right, just before the current period of extreme, human-caused warming. Graphic by Ed Hawkins using data from PAGES2k and HadCRUT4.6
 Some of the disasters of the Little Ice Age may sound familiar. Indeed, many scholars study how people of the past coped with extreme weather to better understand how our societies might respond to global warming. The 17th-century Low Countries (modern Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) provide striking models of just how adaptive and resilient people can be in the face of a changing climate. But they also provide warnings about how climate resilience can create or worsen inequality. Fortunately, the 17th century has furnished us with a unique resource: millions of paintings, prints, and drawings, created by thousands of artists across the Low Countries, that depict elements of everyday life. By 1650 the inhabitants of Holland—the wealthiest province of the Dutch Republic, the precursor state to today’s Netherlands—collectively owned around 2.5 million paintings. Many of these paintings seem to reflect the presence of the Little Ice Age and record its consequences for ordinary people. Some remarkable examples are included in the National Gallery’s collection.
 We look slightly down onto a scene showing light-skinned men, women, and children ice skating on a frozen river in this horizontal landscape painting. We get the impression of hundreds of people gathered on the ice creating a crowd that extends into the hazy distance. The couple dozen closest to us are the most defined. A few clusters of people and individuals in particular draw our attention. For example, a group of three men wearing dark cloaks and hats stand in conversation on our right. Two boys nearby hold sticks and play a game similar to hockey. A small child holds two smaller sticks, perhaps to help balance. A man in the front center wears puffy scarlet-red pants with white stockings, a red jacket, and a tall brown hat with a cloud of scarlet feathers. He stands next to a woman wearing a black hooded cloak over a black skirt and raspberry-pink bodice. She tucks her hands into a cylindrical muffler held at her waist. Another elegantly dressed man in golden yellows and black and a woman in mauve pink and butter yellow stand nearby. Some of people throughout the scene wear white frilly collars and others are more simply dressed in shades of brown, gray, and black. To our right, a faded rose-red windmill stands at the river’s edge, and to our left a large house with steeply pitched and stepped roofs is enclosed within a solid fence painted with pink diamonds against black and white. Smoke rises from one chimney, and other houses and a church line the riverbank into the distance. A wooden bridge near a grove of bare trees connects spit of land near us in the lower left corner with the village beyond. Brilliant azure-blue sky is visible through breaks in the steel-gray clouds above.
      
        
        
            
         	  Adam van Breen, Skating on the Frozen Amstel River, 1611, oil on panel, The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund, in honor of Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., 2010.20.1
 These include stunning winter landscapes, which seem to recreate, with plausible detail, real-life gatherings in frigid weather. For example, Adam van Breen painted Skating on the Frozen Amstel River amid a sequence of chilly winters in the Low Countries, and in 1646—when Jan van Goyen painted Ice Scene near a Wooden Observation Tower—winter was even colder.
 A band of gray ice spans the bottom quarter of this vertical landscape painting, where dozens of people stand, skate, ride in sledges, or cluster near a slender wooden tower, all beneath a vivid blue sky screened with towering gray clouds. We look slightly down onto the scene from a distance. The cloud bank is horizontally streaked with pale yellow light along the bottom, but swells into gray puffs that break apart in several places toward the top to reveal patches of blue sky. The people below wear heavy coats, hats, and trousers, mostly in muted slate blue, gray, and brown. Many have their backs to us. Closest to us and near the lower left corner of the painting, a rectangular wooden sledge on rail-like runners holds five or six passengers, and is pulled by a brown horse toward the center distance. Nearby, a man on his hands and knees scrambles for his fallen hat. A man holds a pole like a hockey stick behind him, looking into the distance where others stand or run with more sticks. Near the bottom center of the painting, a man pushes a sledge laden with two brown bundles. The largest group of people and children gather on and around a rickety wooden pier from which the tower rises, to our right of center. A lantern-like structure sits atop a narrow platform on a tall pole, at the top of the tower. One ladder leads up to a landing about two-thirds of the way up the pole, and another leads to the top. A house with a pitched roof and smoking chimney sits on the far side of the pier, between two bare trees with curling, twisting branches. Birds fly above the tower. The ice is dark gray closest to us, and it becomes paler as it recedes into the distance. People dot the ice singly and in small groups as far as the eye can see. Far away, the silhouettes of a church with a spire, the masts of two ships, a wide tower, and a windmill line the horizon. The artist signed the work with a monogram and a date as if painted on the boat in the lower right corner: “VG 1646.”
      
        
        
            
         	  Jan van Goyen, Ice Scene near a Wooden Observation Tower, 1646, oil on panel, The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund, 2014.35.1
 Although there were forces other than climate change that influenced how artists chose and depicted their subjects, icy landscapes do shed light on how the Dutch adapted to a cooler climate. The coastal Low Countries were crisscrossed by waterways that allowed for the efficient transportation of goods, people, and information. Paintings like those of Van Breen and Van Goyen accurately portray how ordinary people across the Low Countries used sleds and ice skates—a Dutch invention—to keep these transportation networks open in cold weather. To maintain crucial shipments of goods that were easier to send by water, intrepid traders even designed specialized icebreaker ships. Because the Little Ice Age did more than alter temperature, we can look beyond icescapes to see how artists depicted its telltale weather. Ludolf Backhuysen’s Ships in Distress off a Rocky Coast is only one particularly beautiful example of hundreds of Dutch and Flemish paintings that portray ships imperiled by storms. In the waters around the Low Countries, such storms may have been especially severe during cold decades of the Little Ice Age. Storms were often destructive for the Dutch, shattering ships and breaking through dikes that otherwise defended the coastal Low Countries from the sea. Yet because Dutch warships fared better in storms than their English counterparts, bad weather also offered advantages for the Dutch in a series of 17th-century wars with England. One of those wars ended with a Dutch victory in the same year Backhuysen completed his painting.
 Beyond several craggy boulders that loom in the lower left corner of this horizontal painting, three sailing ships pitch wildly in crashing waves beneath towering clouds. At the center, a large ship tips sharply to our right with billowing ivory sails and two red, white, and blue striped flags whipping in the wind. White spray kicks up against the side of the boat and in the waves surrounding it. The sails of the second ship, to our right, are furled except for one that crashes down onto the deck. Tiny people scurry around inside the ship, which tilts steeply up on a high wave. The third ship floats beyond this, its sails also tied up. The top of a tall wooden mast along with a broken wooden pole poke up from emerald-green waves in the lower right corner, near a barrel and two bundles wrapped in cloth and tied with rope that bob nearby. One of the brown, jagged rocks to our left nearly spans the height of the painting while others jut from the water like crooked teeth. A bank of billowing, slate-gray clouds at the center of the sky separates a fog-gray sky and puffy clouds to our right from a patch of golden sunlight to our left, in the upper corner of the canvas. The artist signed and dated the work as if written on a rock at the bottom center of the canvas, “LBackh 1667.”
      
        
        
            
         	  Ludolf Backhuysen, Ships in Distress off a Rocky Coast, 1667, oil on canvas, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1985.29.1
 Despite overwhelming challenges, much of Dutch society thrived during the Little Ice Age. Paintings by Dutch masters capture the extraordinary affluence of the coastal Dutch Republic in the 17th century. Some of this wealth stemmed from the skill with which the Dutch exploited the opportunities offered by a cooling climate and coped with its most destructive weather. Yet over the course of the 17th century, a rising share of Dutch wealth came at the expense of the marginalized and colonized. For example, Dutch merchants controlled Europe’s seaborne grain trade. They used that control to sell grain for handsome profits when cold snaps or droughts ruined harvests and worsened food shortages. In subhumid and dry savanna regions across Africa, cooling may have reduced the burden of diseases like malaria and trypanosomiasis, allowing Dutch slavers to work with more ruthless efficiency. While we should urgently reduce greenhouse gas emissions to minimize the eventual magnitude of global warming, we now have little choice but to adapt to a hotter and more extreme climate. We can find inspiration, and perhaps some reassurance, in 17th-century Dutch history and art. But we must also remember the cost of Dutch successes. Climate adaptation must be just. It must reduce inequality, rather than exacerbate it. If it does, artists may yet paint hopeful vistas of our hotter future.
 Discover More
 Five Artworks about Climate Change
						
							Works from our collection can inspire a conversation about our impact on our environment.
 Making Pictures of the Animals We Eat
						
							Chef, farmer, and storyteller Mike Costello of Lost Creek Farm considers images of hunting and game.
 Portraits of Trees, a Favorite Subject of Artists
						
							Many artists have painted, photographed, and drawn nature’s magnificent sculptures.
 Dagomar Degroot Dagomar Degroot is an associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University. His first book,The Frigid Golden Age, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018 and named by theFinancial Timesas one of the ten best history books of that year. His next book,Ripples in the Cosmic Ocean, is under contract with Harvard University Press and Viking. He publishes equally in historical and scientific journals and is codirector of the Climate History Network and HistoricalClimatology.com. He is cohost of the popular podcastClimate History, and he regularly writes for a popular audience in such publications as theWashington Post,Aeon, andThe Conversation. April 10, 2023








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