Meteorology in the paintings of Jacob van Ruisdael
by Franz Ossing
Dutch landscape painting of the 17 century has gained a unique place in art history; for the first time landscape played a role of its own due to its realist naturalistic reproduction. But the ‘realism’ in the paintings of the Dutch ‘Golden Age’ must not be wrongly interpreted that they represent a linear copy of nature (de Vries 1991), as an early form of landscape photography. The paintings have to be understood as compositions, composed of realistically reproduced elements where the whole is much more than a summary of the single parts. Hedinger (2001) has called this an ‘invented reality’ of landscape.
Read the rest of this article