Dutch Studies Commons^™

Dutch Landscape Painting: Documenting Globalization And Environmental Imagination, Irene J. Klaver

Proceedings from the Document Academy

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 …