Jacob van Ruisdael’s Ecological Landscapes
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A01=Catherine Levesque
Author_Catherine Levesque
Category=AB
Category=AGA
Dutch Golden Age art
ecological landscape interpretation
environment
environmental art history
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
human-nature relationship
landscape painting analysis
materiality in painting
painting
ruisdael
techne
visual ecology
Product details
- ISBN 9781041181613
- Weight: 440g
- Dimensions: 174 x 246mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2025
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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This book examines Jacob van Ruisdael's treatment of five subjects—dunes, grainfields, ruins, rushing water, and woodlands—that recur throughout his career. The paintings, though fictive, show close attention to the complexities of particular environments that can be fruitfully considered “ecological.” The pattern of Ruisdael’s reworking each environment and associated phenomena shows him as laboring over these themes. His work across media conveys something of his demanding and methodical procedure as he sought to achieve pictorially the force, temporality, vitality, and motion of nature. Ruisdael’s paintings decenter humankind within familiar yet reimagined landscapes. His ability to depict nature’s dynamism provided an alternative vision at a foundational moment when landscape, increasingly manipulated and controlled, was most often considered property and investment. His focus on the techniques and processes of his own work to render these entities was essential to his ecological perspective and invites a similar recognition from an attentive viewer.
Catherine Levesque is an Associate Professor at the College of William and Mary. Her previous book, Journey Through Landscape in Seventeenth-Century Holland: The Haarlem Print Series and Dutch Identity examines the role of print culture in providing a framework for developments in printed landscape series and subsequently paintings. She has also published on Pieter Bruegel, Gilles van Coninxloo, Joos de Momper, and Hercules Segers.
