Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Jennifer Scott
ISBN 978 1 905686 25 4
Softback, 250 x 210mm, 176 pages, 100 colour illustrations
Bibliography and Index
Holland in the seventeenth century presented artists with the most man-made landscape in Europe, and one which still exerts a timeless fascination on our imaginations today. The human narrative within the painted landscape could range from depictions of peasants working and relaxing in the tradition of Bruegel to an evocation of aristocratic estates, where noblemen hunted and rode. At the same time other Dutch artists were discovering in Italy a range of different subject-matter: the idealized Arcadian landscape, the vitality of the Roman streetscape, or the hot, ruin-covered mountains of the Romancampagna. Finally there was the sea, which played such a vital role in Dutch consciousness, and which was used to suggest the drama of the nation's life and history.
This book presents some of the finest examples of each of these different types of landscape, discussing how they relate to one another, their context within other works of the period, how their different artists, including masters such as Jacob van Ruisdael and Aelbert Cuyp, influenced each other's explorations of the idea of landscape, and ultimately how each enables us today to enter the Dutch Golden Age.
Desmond Shawe-Taylor is Surveyor of The Queen's Pictures. His publications include Bruegel to Rubens: Masters of Flemish Painting (2007) and The Conversation Piece: Scenes of Fashionable Life (2009).
Jennifer Scott is an Assistant Curator of Paintings at the Royal Collection and is the co-author of Bruegel to Rubens: Masters of Flemish Painting (2007).
Praise for Bruegel to Rubens:
'an abundance of information with a light touch […] illuminating the artists and their works through analogies and references that take us far beyond Flanders'
Theodore K. Rabb, The Art Newspaper