Celebrate the Dutch Landscape

IJssel River near De Steeg, Netherlands. This is one of the photos I exhibit in

the Naarden Photo Festival (see link under "Sources" below; till 29 August 2021).

The way we look at the world around us says much about who we are. Therefore it is not without meaning that it was only in the 14th century that in Europe artists started to paint landscapes. At first landscapes were backgrounds of portraits, but gradually landscapes as such became the main theme. At the end of the 15th century the landscape had become a genre of its own in the western art of painting. At the same time also man and society began to change. The God-centred closed society of the Middle Ages gradually opened itself to the world. Traditional man discovered that things could be different from what it had been for them. Man began to travel and became an explorer and discoverer or a travelling scholar. Rich young people made “grand tours” for their education. Romantics made walks in nature or went to other countries to see different ways of life. People began to travel out of curiosity or just in order to see what there is behind the horizon, or they simply wanted to be away from home. Tourism developed. A new man was born.
In a way, landscapes had always existed before they were painted, of course, and without a doubt some people always have enjoyed them; have enjoyed being there and walking or riding in nature. However, landscapes were not a subject of art and reflection till the end of the Middle Ages. With the expansion of the traditional world there came room for a new look on the space around man: The space seen as landscape.
As such a landscape is not any view or representation of this view (painting or photo) on the man surrounding space, whatever it is. It’s true, generally speaking we can – and often do – call a view of the wild Rocky Mountains or icy Antarctica a landscape, but when we look at the way painters and later also photographers represented the idea, a landscape is usually something different: It is something between the wild untouched nature and the completely man-made environment, the town. In this sense a landscape is a mixture of nature and culture. Actually in all landscape paintings both aspects are present. A landscape painting is meant to represent space and nature but it’s actually never so that we see only wild nature in a landscape painting. There are always elements that refer to man, to human presence. We see a farmhouse, or a cabin, or the shadows of a town in the background; a (usually lonely) man or woman strolling along a muddy road. A landscape is nature and culture in one.
What also seldom is absent in a landscape painting is the horizon, explicitly or implicitly. A horizon symbolizes space, but it indicates also that the world is wider than what you see depicted. In this sense a horizon is also desire. It closes the view but there is always something behind it that we cannot see but actually want to see. It is a limit we want to overcome (although when we try, it moves further and further away, showing that there is no limit to our desires).
This idea of landscape is quite romantic, maybe too romantic. It supposes that there is something like nature in the space represented in the image. Just those painters that have become famous for their landscape pictures, the Dutch masters of the 17th century, in fact depicted fully man-made sceneries, although they suggest a meeting between man and nature. Almost each meadow, each ditch or river, each other element there has been made or shaped by man. Already since ages there is no real nature anymore in the Netherlands. It’s not without reason that there is a Dutch saying that “God made the world and the Dutch made the Netherlands”. And isn’t this so also for large parts of Europe, certainly around cities and bigger villages?
If this was already the case in the 17th century, it is the more so in this day and age in the 21th century. In most of Europe and I dare say on every square cm of the Netherlands nature does no longer exist. Everything there is man-made, everything is culture. Even so-called nature reserves are, and all “wild” birds and animals there actually are zoo animals. But when cities penetrate the countryside, as they increasingly do since the 19th century; when townspeople buy and build houses in the countryside; when the countryside urbanizes, what remains then of the idea of landscape? Or must we give it another meaning?
A few days before I published this blog, in Naarden in the Netherlands the biennial Photo Festival has been opened. A special project of this festival is “Celebrate the Dutch Landscape”. What makes this project so special and valuable, thanks to curator Kenneth Stamp, is that you see there not only landscapes in the traditional sense of the 17th century, but that it discusses the idea of landscape as such: Is the traditional idea of landscape still valid these days that “nature” has become man-made? What has changed in the landscape outside the towns? Must we not look for the landscape also within the towns? Aren’t towns types of landscapes as well? Is there still room for the horizon? Must we regret these changes? In the photo festival these questions are discussed for the Dutch landscape but they are important for everybody who is interested in the idea of landscape.

Sources
- Ton Lemaire, Filosofie van het landschap. Bilthoven: Ambo, 1970.
- Naarden Photo Festival, especially the subpage on the special project Celebrate the Dutch Landscape.