Dutch Landscape Painting: Documenting Globalization and Environmental Imagination

Abstract

There is an old saying that God made the Earth, but the Dutch made the Netherlands; they did this by engineering relationships of the water and land. The Dutch landscape is an authored landscape documenting human reaction to geological, economic, and cultural changes. As a consequence of Dutch globalization, landscape painting arose as a new form of painting, documenting these changes and reactions to them. In a period of newly created land, reclaimed and constructed by sheer human activity, the explicit construction of new environments apparently elicited an implicit desire to hold on to an older, familiar traditional landscape. The Dutch landscape painters were the first to hint at the possible differentiation of places within places and the nesting of multiple places in the social imaginary. Dutch landscape painting raises questions of just what is documented in ‘realistic’ painting; just what is a border; just how might the land, engineering the land, the economy, and the cultural imaginary co-author a painted document.