Journey through landscape in seventeenth-century Holland
Subtitle: the Haarlem print series and Dutch identity
By: Catherine Levesque.
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
Published: 1994
Place of publication: University Park, Pa
Language: eng
Number of pages: 169
Subjects: Landscape prints, Dutch -- Netherlands -- Haarlem -- 17th century.; Netherlands -- In art.
Other titles: Journey through landscape in 17th-century Holland.
Description: 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.

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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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [157]-163) and index.