An investigation into how landscape drawings helped shape Dutch identity in the 16th and 17th centuries

Edited by Joanna Sheers Seidenstein and Susan Anderson

Published in 2022

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Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, amid enormous expansion in global commerce and colonization, landscape drawing played a key role in forging Dutch national identity. Featuring works on paper by Rembrandt, Bruegel, and Ruisdael, among dozens of other artists, this study examines how a hyperlocal impulse in many of these drawings inspired domestic pride and a sense of connection to the land, as they also reflected aspects of the broader ecological, social, and political change taking place in the era. The book’s essays offer close readings that push our understandings of these artists and their work in important new directions, including topics related to eco-criticism, land use and environmentalism, race, and class.

Joanna Sheers Seidenstein served as the 2018–22 Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellow, and Susan Anderson is curatorial research associate for Dutch and Flemish drawings, both in the Division of European and American Art at the Harvard Art Museums.

With contributions by George Abrams, Susan Anderson, Yvonne Bleyerveld, Anne Driesse, Joseph Leo Koerner, William W. Robinson, and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein.

The exhibition Crossroads: Drawing the Dutch Landscape is on view at the Harvard Art Museums from May 21 through August 14, 2022.

Funding for the exhibition and related programming was provided by the Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Support Fund and the M. Victor Leventritt Lecture Series Endowment Fund. The accompanying catalogue was made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Publication Funds, including the Henry P. McIlhenny Fund, and by the WOLFGANG RATJEN FOUNDATION, Liechtenstein.

 

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