Uncharted Water: Exploring Ecology, Space and Place in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Representations

With their inhospitable terrain marked by freezing winters, swampy marshes, and salty tides, the Low Countries were subject to an ecological precarity that significantly shaped the collective consciousness of its citizens. This presentation will examine how Dutch artists registered the local environment, and how these visual responses shaped the ways that Dutch citizens related to one another and the world around them. Through an analysis of prints and paintings of Holland’s terrain, including Jacob van Ruisdael’s bleaching fields, Esaias van de Velde’s windmills and waterways, Hendrik Avercamp’s frozen canals, and Claes Jansz Visscher’s villages, the paper will address the ways in which landscape imagery served as an index of social change. In what ways did the Dutch feel responsible to the physical landscape and how is this responsibility pictured? Specific attention will be given to the ways in which the aforementioned artists depicted the effects of the Little Ice Age, how they showed Dutch citizens coping with these changes, and finally, how they visually addressed the environmental impact of agricultural and economic activity. Drawing attention to the powerful agency of the imagination in the creation of landscape, space, and place, this paper seeks to complicate traditional associations with landscape, its representation, perception, and interpretive strategies. Furthermore, by studying the possibilities and limits of an ecocritical interpretation of the Dutch landscape tradition, it aims to generate important insights on not only contemporary environmental concerns, but also the relevance of seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture to the current climate crisis.