Dutch Landscape Painters

Herman van Swanevelt could have been classified in the Italian chapter of this catalog, where the French painter Claude Lorrain could also have been classified, for the manner in which each imbibed the classical Italian landscape. After living and painting in Rome from 1629 to 1641, Swanevelt spent the rest of his career in Paris, where he remained an influential proponent of the Dutch Italianate landscape style. The potential and implications of that style provided an important framework for several of the subsequent landscape painters in this chapter (some of whom could have been cataloged among the figure painters).

Melville’s landscape prints in this section feature a great variety of outdoor scenes—on river banks in Italy and Holland; in sweet pastoral harmony and fierce rural warfare; with people who are on the move, snugly situated, or entirely absent; along water that is decidedly smooth or visibly turbulent. The ruling spirit for this Dutch landscape section, as with its figurative predecessor, is nicely captured in a sentence about Adriaen van Ostade and his contemporaries in Melville’s copy of Works:  “There was not a class of Dutch society, not a variety of the Batavian race, not a single condition, which had not in Amsterdam its painter” (1: 210-11).   

One imagines that Melville was planning to do considerably more work on “At the Hostelry” (or on Dutch painting in general) when he acquired Cundall’s The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland in 1891, the last year of his life. Cundall, in contrast to Gower in The Figure Painters of Holland, treated fewer painters in more depth (four landscape painters in contrast to Gower’s twelve figure painters). Cundall’s four landscape and pastoral painters are Ruisdael, Hobbema, Cuyp, and Potter (Sealts no.169).  Melville collected all of them, and many more, as we shall see. One challenge of this section was in deciding how to group its diverse landscape painters within their often overlapping sub-genres.  

• Works cited in Dutch Landscape Painters:
  

• Blankert, Albert. Dutch 17th Century Italianate Landscape Painters. Soest: Davaco, 1978. 

• Cundall, Frank. The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland: Ruisdeal, Hobbema, Cuyp, Potter. New York: Scribner and Welford, 1891 (Sealts no. 169). 

  Harris, Ann Sutherland, et. al. Landscape Painting in Rome, 1595-1675. New York: R.L. Feigen, 1985.  

  Stechow, Wolfgang. Dutch Landscape Painting of the Seventeenth Century. London: Phaidon, 1966. 

  Sutton, Peter C, et. al. Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1987.