Jacob Van Ruisdael's Ecological Landscapes

Erscheinungsjahr 2024
ISBN: 978-90-485-5891-9
Verlag: Amsterdam University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 53, 236 Seiten, Format (B × H): 174 mm x 247 mm, Gewicht: 736 g

Reihe: Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700

This book examines Jacob van Ruisdael's treatment of five subjects—dunes, grainfields, ruins, rushing water, and woodlands—that recur throughout his career. The paintings, though fictive, show close attention to the complexities of particular environments that can be fruitfully considered “ecological.” The pattern of Ruisdael’s reworking each environment and associated phenomena shows him as laboring over these themes. His work across media conveys something of his demanding and methodical procedure as he sought to achieve pictorially the force, temporality, vitality, and motion of nature. Ruisdael’s paintings decenter humankind within familiar yet reimagined landscapes. His ability to depict nature’s dynamism provided an alternative vision at a foundational moment when landscape, increasingly manipulated and controlled, was most often considered property and investment. His focus on the techniques and processes of his own work to render these entities was essential to his ecological perspective and invites a similar recognition from an attentive viewer.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Levesque, Catherine

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: Barock, Klassizismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Künstlerische Stoffe, Motive, Themen Künstlerische Stoffe, Motive, Themen: Natur & Tiere (Stillleben, Landschaften etc.)

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

I Dunes: Man in Nature

Dune Landscapes and Pleasant Places

'Duinen en Wildernissen'

Dunes and Country Roads

The Dune Environment

II Grainfields: Making Landscape

Techn.: Labor and Landscape

The Wild and the Sown

Processes of Art: Processes of Nature

Point of View

III Ruins: Temporality and Transformation

Things Fall Apart: Broken Bridges

Monumental Ruins

Biological Time

Destruction and Reconstruction

IV Water: Matter in Motion

Mills and Millruns

Ocean

Waterfalls

V Woodlands and Marshes: Art and Nature

Woodlands

Realizing Vital Form

Sylva

Landscapes Tame and Wild

Conclusion

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Levesque, Catherine
Catherine Levesque is an Associate Professor at the College of William and Mary. Her previous book, Journey Through Landscape in Seventeenth-Century Holland: The Haarlem Print Series and Dutch Identity examines the role of print culture in providing a framework for developments in printed landscape series and subsequently paintings. She has also published on Pieter Bruegel, Gilles van Coninxloo, Joos de Momper, and Hercules Segers.