Jacob van Ruisdael is widely acknowledged as one of the great Dutch landscape artists of the 17th century. This major study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the artist's work and critical reception.

Windmills were ubiquitous in seventeenth-century Holland and they remain the best-known symbol of the Dutch landscape. Jacob van Ruisdael first depicted them as a precocious teenager and continued to represent all types in various settings until his very last years. Water mills, in contrast, were scarce in the new Dutch Republic, found mainly in the eastern provinces, particularly near the border with Germany. Ruisdael discovered them in the early 1650s and was the first artist to make water mills the principal subject of a landscape. His most celebrated painting, Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede at the Rijksmuseum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum's Two Undershot Water Mills with an Open Sluice are the centerpieces of this overview of the artist's depictions of windmills and water mills. Both depended upon forces of nature for their operation, but their use in the Netherlands and their place in seventeenth-century Dutch art differed considerably. This book examines their role in Holland and introduces readers to the pleasure of studying Ruisdael's images of them, a joy conveyed by the English landscapist John Constable in a letter written to his dearest friend after seeing a Ruisdael painting of a water mill in a London shop: “It haunts my mind and clings to my heart.”

Summary: "W.G. Sebald, frequently mentioned in the same breath as Franz Kafka and Vladimir Nabokov, is one of the most important European writers of recent decades. He has been lauded by such major cultural commentators as Susan Sontag and Paul Auster, and he has combined wide public appeal with universal critical acclaim. His work is concerned with questions of memory, exile, representation, and, above all else, history. But his approach to history is strikingly different from conventional historiographical writing on the one hand, and from the historical novel on the other. His texts are hybrid in nature, mixing fiction, biography, historiography, travel-writing and memoir, and incorporating numerous photographic images. This volume seeks to respond to the complexities of Sebaldʼs image of history by presenting essays by a team of international scholars, all of whom are acknowledged Sebald experts. It offers a unique and exciting perspective on the dazzling work of one of the major literary figures of our times."--Publisher description.

This volume examines the image-based methods of interpretation that pictorial and literary landscapists employed between 1500 and 1700.

If you know the 26 letters of the alphabet and can count to 99 -- or are just learning -- you'll love Tana Hoban's brilliant creation. This innovative concept book is two books in one!

Offering a corrective to the common scholarly characterization of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting as modern, realistic and secularized, Boudewijn Bakker here explores the long history and purpose of landscape in Netherlandish painting. In Bakker's view, early Netherlandish as well as seventeenth-century Dutch painting can be understood only in the context of the intellectual climate of the day. Concentrating on landscape painting as the careful depiction of the visible world, Bakker's analysis takes in the thought of figures seldom consulted by traditional art historians, such as the fifteenth-century philosopher Dionysius the Carthusian, the sixteenth-century religious reformer John Calvin, the geographer Abraham Ortelius and the seventeenth-century poet Constantijn Huygens. Probing their conception of nature as 'the first Book of God' and art as its representation, Bakker identifies a world view that has its roots in the traditional Christian perceptions of God and creation. Landscape and Religion from Van Eyck to Rembrandt imposes a new layer of interpretation on the richly varied landscapes of the great masters. In so doing it adds a new dimension to the insights offered by modern art-historical research. Further, Bakker's explorations of early modern art and literature provide essential background for any student of European intellectual history.

Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869)--court physician to the king of Saxony--was a naturalist, amateur painter, and theoretician of landscape painting whose Nine Letters on Landscape Painting is an important document of early German romanticism and an elegant appeal for the integration of art and science. Carus was inspired by and had contacts with the greatest German intellectuals of his day. Carus prefaced his work with a letter from his correspondence with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was his primary mentor in both science and art. His writings also reflect, however, the influence of the German natural philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, especially Schelling's notion of a world soul, and the writings of the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Carus played a role in the revolution in landscape painting taking place in Saxony around Caspar David Friedrich. The first edition appears here in English for the first time.

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