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The word schilderachtig - painterly - captures the paradoxical phenomenon that early seventeenth-century Dutch landscape paintings emphatically favor the unassuming nature of the countryside in order to bring out the very artfulness of their pictorial representation.Dutch seventeenth-century landscape painting has often been characterized as schilderachtig - literally: »painterly.« Referring to a certain looseness in the handling of the brush, the seemingly tautological and rarely critically discussed term also captures the idea that the landscape image »realistically« renders the, rather unassuming, idiosyncrasies of the Dutch countryside, including the often-overcast skies, moist and windy atmospheric conditions, without any aesthetic or other value judgement about the appropriateness of these motifs for a work of art. The book argues that early in the seventeenth century, however, the term had specifically rhyparographic connotations related to the proverbial Hollandse botheid (»Dutch rudeness«). In accordance, Jan van Goyen (1596-1656) and others began to depict base and even hideous aspects of the countryside not as the coincidental result of an indiscriminatory pictorial mimesis concept, but resulting from a preference for motifs of questionable »paint-worthiness« - in order, by way of contrast, to bring out the painter`s art-full representational skill per se. Schilderachtig stood for the contradictio in picturis of Hollandse botheid as a paradoxical means to evince »painterly« artifice.
About the author
Reindert Falkenburg held Professorships in Art History in Berkeley (GTU), Leiden University, and NYU Abu Dhabi; Fellowships and Visiting Professorships i. a. in Amsterdam, Boston, Princeton, Santa Barbara and Berlin.
Publications i. a.: Joachim Patinir: Landscape as an Image of the Pilgrimage of Life (1988); The Fruit of Devotion. Mysticism and the Imagery of Love in Flemish Paintings of the Virgin and Child, 1450-1550 (1994); The Land of Unlikeness - Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (2011); Especulationes sobre el paisaje: del Bosco a Bruegel (2019).
