New Grounds for Dutch Landscape

Journal of Landscape Architecture / 2-2022 How often are we offered a novel look at seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting? And how often does art criticism take mud, clay, silt, sand, water, marshland, dirt and mire as its subject, insisting not only on acknowledging the presence of these base materials, but also their performative and constitutive agency on the art in question? Lytle Shaw’s book New Grounds for Dutch Landscape offers a critical reading of the Dutch Golden Age school of painting, with an exclusive focus on Jan van Goyen, Jacob van Ruisdael and Meindert Hobbema, a trio that ‘seems marginal in many histories of landscape aesthetics, and art more generally’ (p. 203). The book is, however, more than a reading of a set of Dutch landscape painters. It discusses the failure of the diagrammatical pastoral space to engage with embodied landscape practices, and with the existential experience of filtered light, failing grounds and wet feet. Even more radically, however, it contrasts ideas of beauty, perspective and atmosphere with the prominence of what Shaw calls ‘incalcitrant matter’_matter that does not stay in place, that invades, flows, combines and becomes mud. Puddles hold a prominent place: ‘They are points when paths break down, when the water that the Dutch have been trying to hold back has entered at a mundane, low key level’ (p. 48). Thereby, these three painters seem more manifestly than any other to read the Dutch national ground. Shaw’s claim is that these painters do not as much represent the landscape, but re-enact it. In so doing they focus attention on the material state of the landscape, one that is particularly acute in a seventeenth-century Holland where landscape is incessantly being made, unmade and remade by hydroengineering on the one hand and entropic forces on the other: drainage problems, flooding, abrasion and erosion of the ground plane. The ur-scene of the Dutch experiment is not only of raising land from the sea, but the existential significance of producing one’s own ground (p. 93), a struggle presented in Ruisdael’s many paintings of broken dikes, torrents of water and pumping stations. Jan van Goyen’s View of Haarlem and the Haarlemmermeer (1646) may serve as the best example of how cities in this specific mud-centred trio seem to barely have made it out of the murky waters. Humans, cattle and ramshackle abodes seems to only just, or maybe not, be resting on dry ground. Lytle Shaw’s readings show how these specific Golden Age painters are not about looking at the landscape, but at what it is made of and the practices that make them_either by literally constructing them by way of engineering or by enacting them as wanderer, herder or ‘doing’ landscape in other ways. Shaw unlearns our computed tendencies to read ‘view’ and ‘pastoral’ in any landscape scenery. In fact, this shift in focus is literally performed in the paintings themselves, he claims, in an act of overlooking what in more traditional painting would have prominence, or literally, by the act of pointing. In these paintings, the foreground is almost never a proscenium, where a viewer is resting safely en face an expansive view. Meindert Hobbema’s Woodland Pond radically portrays the foreground as an impossible vantage point of an open pond: ‘No, what is strangely anti-social about Hobbema’s foregrounds is that their detailing and scale are not enticements to stop and look’ (p. 226). The large logs often placed in his foregrounds ‘operate more as obstructions than as polite enticements’ (ibid.). In Van Goyen’s paintings the foreground is often a field of watery mudholes to be traversed or circumvented. In Dune-Landscape with Figures, one of the figures in a group points, not to the horizon as we might imagine by cultural default, but to the state of the murky ground that they will be forced to make it across or preferably around. Lytle Shaw New Grounds for Dutch Landscape