How did Dutch landscape artists engage with ecological loss?

Caro Fowler speaks with Joost Keizer about the consequential environmental histories embedded within seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. Moving beyond celebratory narratives of realism and national identity, the conversation explores how war, deforestation, land reclamation, and colonial expansion reshaped both the Dutch environment and artistic representations of nature. Together, Fowler and Keizer consider whether landscape painting emerged not simply from an admiration of nature, but from experiences of ecological loss, environmental control, and human concepts of making. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Welcome to Iconoclass Art Histories with Carol. I'm often struck in Williamstown where I live and the Clark Art Institute where I work, how the landscape here evokes the kind of painting that I grew up studying as a PhD student, particularly 17th-century Dutch landscape painting. There are pastures of cows and fences and ruined abandoned dwellings. And it's a certain vision of nature and farmland coming into relationship with one another that I think we've been trained to see as aesthetically pleasing and beautiful. And sometimes I wonder how much this landscape has been formed through the lens of painting and our ideas of what a landscape should look like, and how much it is actually a reflection of nature's own desires or own desire to see something. As a scholar of Dutch art, I'm particularly interested in this question as landscape painting had a meteoric rise as a genre in the 17th-century Dutch Republic, stemming from multiple factors, including the rise of Dutch nationalism, a pride in making airple farmland, and a movement away from religious painting towards other genres. And I could go on. Nevertheless, there remains significant work to consider Dutch landscape painting as also emerging from the ecological devastation brought on by wars with Spain. And I'm very wary of the deployment of terms like ecology, ecological, and anthropocene in art history, as often art is used as a tool to make us appreciate nature or to be more ecologically focused. But I find that that particular bent does not always address how art has perhaps contributed to our ongoing environmental problems and the ways in which we are estranged from art environments. Nevertheless, one of the historians today working in these questions, whom I find particularly compelling, is Joost Kaiser, who generously shared with me some of his unpublished work for this conversation. And we're gonna dive into the ways in which Joost is wading into this territory of the ecological and landscape and Dutch history and articulating, I think, in really important ways, the necessity of thinking about nature as a historical entity and how that might change our understanding of Dutch landscape painting. Please join us for this conversation. So, in order to get started, I thought it would make the most sense to ask for a brief overview about how you came to work on the tradition of Dutch landscape and what brought you to this material.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Thanks for inviting me. First of all, love to say more about Dutch landscape painting. I came to the subject by coincidence. I come from a background of doing research in Italian art, mostly 15th and 16th century art, and was interested in the relationship between art and nature. And not nature as a kind of aesthetic concept that pictures just look well if you imitate nature, which is what previous scholars had worked on. But I really wanted to know how people in 15th and 16th century Italy looked at their at the difference between human making and natural processes of becoming. And then 2015, so a long time ago already, I relocated from the United States back to Holland. Got a job in Groningen up north in the country, and there was no specialist in um Dutch Baroque art. But we just decided to make an international program out of a Dutch language program, and our internationals came for Dutch art. So I started teaching Dutch art and started reading more than I had read as an undergrad and just as an amateur 17th-century art historian, and discovered that there's quite a lot of room to still work on Dutch landscape painting. I started to think about okay, I know how Italians thought about nature, but what about the Dutch? Discovered that it was completely different, used completely different concepts of nature, and then I thought, why not work on Dutch landscape painting? So I started reading, and then at some point I in 2019 I moved to Harlem, where I still live, which was considered by art historians as sort of the birthplace of Dutch landscape painting, and particularly in the dunes, what they used to call the wilderness in the 17th century, that are very close to where I live. And then COVID hit, and so I was alone with that same kind of landscape that my artist used to work on. And so I got to know the landscape really well, stopped reading because read everything around me, had no access to archives or libraries at the time. And then started thinking about the history of that landscape that I was moving through myself. And that's a little bit in a nutshell how I came to the subject.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

Yeah, it's interesting. I think so many ways, in so many ways to work on landscape, ultimately you do need to put the books away and live in the landscape and think about it from that perspective, at least for our historical moment.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:48

Yeah. Yeah. So in some of the work that you shared with me, you argue that the rise of landscape painting can't be separated from deforestation campaigns by the Spanish. And you talk very evocatively, I think, about a pre-war landscape and a post-war landscape within the Netherlands. And I would just love to have you expand on that a little bit for our audience and what that means towards thinking about landscape as a historical entity that's shaped by political conflict.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Yeah, I pre-war is pre-Spanish war.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

Although I'm sure that there's also a pre-war landscape for the 20th century and I think so.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

I'm always interested in these kind of historical fissures. So when people start thinking about it before and after. And this is the case in the 1480s, 1580s in the Netherlands, when the Spanish disappear and iconoclasm sh slowly wanes, and people in Amsterdam, Harlem, Leiden start to go outside again and see their they laid under siege, particularly Harlem, Leiden, and saw that the forests surrounding their towns were gone. The Spanish destroyed them. And that came with an enormous campaign, at least around Harlem, that I've done most of my research on, of replanting forests, of remaking the land. And in the deeds to plant seeds in the deforested areas, they talk about a pre-war landscape. They say things like the woods as they used to be before the war, the large woods that we used to have before the Spanish came. It's these kinds of formulations that you find. And for me, that moment of the war was also a moment where sort of natural growth of the Dutch landscape stopped and people started to remake the landscape according to human concepts of making. Beauty is associated with trees standing in a row, for instance. That's also how the forests are replanted with nice trees in rows. They have little paths that do not lead anywhere, but lead to a spot where you can sit under a tree. These kinds of things you can read in poetry and descriptions of the woods. So they're really make remaking the landscape into a sort of pleasurable space outside that is not just used for timber. So the wood is really there as a kind of the woods are there as an aesthetic space. And that's they imagine that space existed before the war, and we have some evidence that it did. But the big difference is that the pre-war landscape was natural, and then the post-war landscape is curated, it's human.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

Yeah. That's so interesting. I have several questions from that. One of my questions is I guess the first one that I feel more urgently perhaps is how do you think this intervention into nature that the Dutch were able to begin at the end of the 16th century and into the 17th century impacted how they then approached and thought about their more expansionist tendencies around the world, their colonial practices? I mean, I've always been struck by how so many of the warfare techniques during the 30, during the wars on the European continent, then traveled elsewhere, and how so many of those mercenary soldiers then became kind of soldiers on the global stage of the Dutch Empire, and how something like the deforestation campaigns that the Dutch witnessed and then were able to curate a new forest afterwards might impact how one thinks about their kind of deforestation campaigns on the Banda Islands, or think about their deforestation campaigns elsewhere. If you think it instilled a sense that nature could always be manipulated and brought back.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

One part of my thinking is really informed by ideas about failure. I have just finished editing a book with uh Stein Büssel, Sonica Grotebour, and Natasha Seaman about failure, where we also argue that this whole idea of the enthusiasm of making things, that the whole world is makeable, causes an enormous failure. So speculation inland causes overgrazing and therefore failure. Fishing communities disappear. The draining campaigns were successful insofar that they looked successful on paper, but it was difficult living there. So that was a that was a big problem. I mean, the relationship between Dutch land making and the colonies is causal. There's a yeah, the monies that are spent draining the Bamster, for instance, are um spent by by the VOC. So it's money that comes from colonization efforts and is then pumped back into the draining of lakes. Um, the earliest sources also talk about that as a form of pride, a kind of circular system where you extract nature from places that are far away and where nature is unending. And so that's also the idea. Their ideas about Brazil is Brazil, Brazilian wood will never ever stop, it will always be there. And that was a huge difference between completely deforested northern Europe, except for small patches still in Germany, Italy was deforested, Spain was deforested, so they got their trees from the Baltic region and uh Scandinavian countries. And then in the course of the 17th century, they got ebony wood from Brazil, but that took a while.

SPEAKER_00 11:59

It's interesting because sometimes I and I wonder if this is part of your thinking on Sagers. It seems to me, for example, Abraham Blumar, he studies trees, it almost seems as though they are personal objects and works within his landscape and his daily life, and he's interested in their destruction and the ways in which they decay or the ways in which they die. And there it seems to be kind of a Dutch tradition of draw of drawing dead trees or trees that are stumps or not no longer living exactly. And so I'm just curious: do you see a criticality within certain artists' projects about this approach to the possibilities of constantly remaking an endlessly abundant nature?

SPEAKER_01 12:46

I think the Dutch tradition of the confrontation, as you call it, with one individual tree and it's life comes out of the depravity of woods in the Netherlands. So I do think that the sort of lonely oaks that you find in Vanchoi and in wherever that people also talk about that's not just one tree that gives you a sort of aesthetic pleasure as a as an object that has a but that also has a life that cleans the air. So they knew already early in the 17th century that the replanting of the woods, they say that cleansed the air. There was improvement in air quality. I mean, I found this one document of the drafting of a law in Harlem against vandalism of trees, not because of the timber that needed to be used, but because of the good people, the good citizen passing by that tree. And that's why it could not be vandalized. So that puts the tree in a culture of people who enjoy looking at that one tree. And that's what you find in in Dutch art too. And it's different, I think, than the Italian tradition that I know. When Titian draws trees, it's multiple trees. Even Leonardo draws multiple trees. There's no botanical interest in the Dutch artists, it's an interest in the way that I don't know, the bark of a tree deforms when it needs to circle around an injury in the tree, these kinds of things. That's what they're interested in. So growth.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

Yeah, that's very interesting. So that gets us a little bit to your to a term that you're developing called naturoclasm. And so perhaps you could speak about this relationship in which you're articulating bringing iconoclasm and nature into relationship through your scholarship and your writing as a way to think about the Dutch relationship to the natural world that is specific.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

Yeah, so I introduced the term because that moment of killing falling trees coincided with iconoclasm.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:02

So when the Abbey of Rheinsberg was destroyed then by iconoclasts, then the Spanish in that same year destroyed the woods south of Harlem. And probably all the woods from between Harlem and Leiden, which is about 20 miles separate. So it's an enormous stretch of trees that was destroyed. So it's that one moment, but it's also it made me think more deeply about what people focus on when they write about deforestation in the early 17th century. And there was one moment that really struck me is that they the Dutch knew from reading Tacitus and Pliny that their land had been covered by deep forests. They also duck up all these trees, so these big oaks that had been underground since 15,000 years, but they thought it had been underground more recently, and they did a sort of archaeological reconstruction where they saw that the tops of the trees were oriented southeast, so that must have been a northwestern storm that hit them and felt them. And then they thought, okay, when could this have happened? And then they remembered Willibroard, who the bishop who Christianized the Netherlands back in the late 7th and early 8th century, and who they imagined had prayed to his Christian god in order to knock down the woods that were invested by nature gods. So the kind of gods that pagan Roman religion they imagined were still there. They imagined that Diana had lived in Holland. And that sort of eighth century was the end of the forests because Billy Rod prayed to his Christian god and that God wiped down the forests. And then that happened again by the Spanish. And what's interesting about all the documentation surrounding the destruction of the Harlem woods is that first of all, there was an aesthetics of tree stumps that were still there, so akin to the scratch marks on paintings that were still in place, sort of evidence of iconoclastic motives. That was one, and second was that trees that could be used for timber because they fell down, and that timber was sold, and the money was reinvested in the upkeep of Protestant churches. And those Protestant churches were in the same as the Catholic churches. So there was a direct connection between the destruction of the wards, the regrowing of the woods south of Harlem, and investments in the new religion.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

That's really interesting. That's fascinating. You have a sentence in one of your essays that I loved, and I just want to spend some time breaking it apart or thinking about it, not breaking it apart, but thinking about it, which is you cannot write a history of nature like you can write a history of art. And as I told you, I find this fascinating and I don't disagree, but I might disagree a little bit on why. And you posit style as the reason. And so I would just love to hear more about that. Because for me, there is continues to be something frustrating about the ways that ecology and nature are written about in art history. And I can't always put my finger on it. And I think you're right that it is that they are fundamentally different and that you can't write these two the same. But I would love to hear from you more about this question of style and really why you can't write a history of nature like you can write a history of art.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

Yeah, it's a good question. And it's sort of they all are. Um this is one that I've thought about for a long while. Yeah. There is at the origins of our discipline, the academic origins is in the 19th-century German-speaking world. And Wilf Lin famously tried to write a history of art on the basis of style, which he believed moved stylistically through time, but also in ecological pockets. So the north was one ecological pocket, the south was another. So that was one thing. And then the other was that people later understood Wolflin's ideas in the context of Darwin and the evolution. But I think the big difference between being an artist or being a tree or a bird is that trees and birds they imitate, they replicate.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

That's what they do.

SPEAKER_01 19:47

A bird can replicate sound, it can replicate movements, that's how it learns. But a bird doesn't go back to an earlier species of birds in order to revive that. It can build a cycle, it can't revive.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

It doesn't historize its own.

SPEAKER_01 20:06

No, it doesn't. And there's a really great book by Jeff Dolvin, whose work I really admire, literary theorist, and it's called Senses of Style, Poetry Before Interpretation. Yeah. And he really he tries to think about what style is, and then style is basically everything except for a couple of things, and and that's where it gets interesting for me. So what is in style? And it's he uses examples like a wave rolling into the beach, which it can do in a particular style, it does so in a its form, surely, but there's a big difference between form and style. Yeah, and style is that sort of that conscious making something in relation to something else, so it either is your body or someone else's body, it's a an object in front of you, or an object that has been made a thousand years before, yeah, and that's the big difference. So it's a kind of reflection on what it means to imitate and what it means to be different, what it means to lose yourself in something or someone else. And nature can't do that, so it's it's not hurried. Nature just does things at its own pace, and what human beings can do is hurry their stylistic evolution or loop it back a thousand years. And nature doesn't do that, it has no need to do it. Maybe we don't have that need either, but I'm interested in the moments when those needs arise. And that doesn't happen that way in nature, it happens that way in human cultures.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

So if you can't write a history of nature like you can write a history of art, what do you think happens when we try to understand a histed version of the natural world through? Methods and models of art history. And I'll just put my cards on the table. Part of me thinks that the Western art historical canon in particular is part of the problem perhaps with our orientation to the natural world, that it's created a kind of bounded, aestheticized, contained approach to the natural world that could be deeply troubled and possibly through deeply troubling might change how we think about our relationship to what it means to be beings that live and die. So I would just be curious to hear how you think about, because I think you're right, but I'm curious to hear how you're then thinking about processing these methods of art history to maybe bring out what is what is strange within nature and what is what we can't ever. I think about it like the poem How to Look at a Blackbird 13 Ways, that that we're always approaching, but we will never have that bird's eye view, really.

SPEAKER_01 23:02

Yeah, that's a good question. I think that the artist I work with try to and work on, try to think about this question. Right? So what it means to first of all, I mean the move it's done in steps. So the first move is to think as a city dweller who rarely ever is in touch with wild nature, to thinking about what it means as a human being to be and move through nature. I see that happening in early 17th century Dutch art. If I think of someone like Salomon von Reisdaw, one of the pioneers, he goes into the dunes and he tries to understand what it means for the earth to erode, and he tries to understand why people can't do anything about it, and he tries to understand how people who need to walk through the dunes in order to get home from wherever they come from struggle walking through that dune sand. So that's one of the things. So what it means to be there in nature, that's one of the things that people try to understand. There's no effort to think from the perspective of nature itself. They, I mean, they in a deeply troubling way they personify nature as a woman, of course. The Dutch, more so than the Italians, I know from early modern times, really feel that nature's force should be curbed, should be contained, should be marginalized. That's also what they do. They believe that nature still reigns in the Dune area, so it's the loose and blows away, blows over arable end. That's what they're trying to contain. And they sometimes try to think what it means to be a dune. There's one schoolmaster in late 16th century, which is a small village up north and towards the island of Tesla, tries to think what it means to be a dune, spilling its sand like a skirt over arable land, making its way northwards up the coast. That's about it. And it's, I mean, my thesis on 17th century Holland is that it's not only anthropocentric, but it's also it believes in the capacity of humans to remake the world into an image of themselves, in a really in a Protestant way. So recreating the world. And I think that artists try to participate in that, and in a difficult way. So to circle back to your question, there's this one really fascinating concept that Dutch artists work with, and it is typically Dutch and sculpt the painter-like, schilderachtig. It's thinking like the painter. So Huagens with the painters, is a world made by them. And he means that the painter draws attention to a different kind of natural world than other people do. And that to me is a world of dust and sand, drift sand, water, things that are uncontained. And the one big shift that happens in Dutch art, particularly by this fascinating figure of Porcellus, who's a maritime painter, is that he starts to understand no longer the water as a highway that you can sail ships on and transport goods over, but as matter, as things in which you can in stuff in which you can drown, made of waves that can destroy things. And you see that sort of push towards understanding what it means to be in and with matter, that starts to inform Dutch landscape painting.

SPEAKER_00 27:22

For you, where do you see that in in his seascapes and his maritime painting? That kind of turn towards matter as opposed to thinking about the maritime space as a transit ground.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

Oh, just very basic art historical comparison. I compare him to the earlier painters of harbors where you see the ships and the mirrors of the ships that the back of the ships mirrored in the water. Everything the water serves as a in a sort of narcissistic way. It serves to replicate the world. It stops with so there's no more mirroring in in Porcellus. With Porcellus, it's waves. He's capable of painting rain in a way that the Japanese only could as a really make not just making the air look humid, but really painting water as a substance falling down from cloud on people and on ships, making ships heavier and still floating on that water but barely.

SPEAKER_00 28:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

I think that's the thing. So it's being submerged in the matter that is water.

SPEAKER_00 28:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

And I think that move and the other move towards trying to understand what it feels like to move through the quicksand of the dunes, that was an effort to understand what nature is in its sort of pure chaotic origins.

SPEAKER_00 28:48

Yeah, I love that. One thing that I recognize it's a controversial book, but one of the theses from Svetlana Alper's Art of Describing that I always found fascinating to think with from her really drawing on narrative theory that was happening in the 1970s at Berkeley, but to think about the idea of what it means to make a picture in which the narrator or the human witness is absent, and what it means to think about creating a picture that seems untouched by the fiction of the narrator. And I do think that that's a tension within Dutch painting is this kind of aspect of what has been called realism or has been called this kind of the obsession with likening Vermeer to early photographic processes. But I would be curious about how you think about that tension in Dutch painting with what I think you're very persuasively and beautifully arguing, that this is a moment in which it is all about thinking about a made world that the human can make in their own image.

SPEAKER_01 29:54

I don't agree that that Dutch painting is a non-narrative painting, but I fully understand what Alpers wants to do. And it's I think that the difference between how I think about the Dutch 17th century and how she thinks about it is that for me it's not a descriptive world.

SPEAKER_00 30:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:16

Because description is a way of recording the world as a kind of afterfact. So the whole discussion after life is both close to life but also at a distance from life. And I think that Alpers needs that distance. It's almost a kind of stoic way of looking at the world.

SPEAKER_00 30:37

I think you're right.

SPEAKER_01 30:38

I mean, in her interpretation, you're not part of that world, right? Yeah. The descriptive world that has been described for you, whether or not you believe it's narrative or or non-narrative. And and it's deeply unauthored, as she thinks. So her concepts of style are unauthored concepts of style. They're fascinating, and I always wonder why people don't really pick up on them. There's moments where she tries to argue that there's basically no stylistic difference between Van Eyck and van Hoy, and it's done or vermeer, I think she says, which is a radical statement, but I I understand what she means, but it has to do with the sort of distant recording of the world.

SPEAKER_00 31:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:20

And I think that happens in vermeer, maybe. I think she's right. It doesn't happen in Dutch landscape painting. Dutch landscape painting is meant to draw you into the matter that the world is made of and that you can't control. I see Dutch landscape painting as a sort of critical counterpart of what real landmakers are doing. So people who drain lakes and who make objects that they insert into a natural landscape. And the insertion is visible in sort of grid system of roads and ditches that they make. And van Hoyen and others, they focus on the mud, the unmateness, the the wilderness, it's rewilding imagery that is that you don't look at from a distance. I think that's the point. It's almost portrait. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:09

Yeah. I'm interested in the ways in which certain projects emerge for people at points in their lives and their careers. And do you it sounds like this is a project that so deeply comes out of living in Harlem, the moment that you're at in your career and thinking, and also maybe your own personal relationship and orientation to the world. Is that accurate?

SPEAKER_01 32:34

Yeah, it's accurate. I don't think I could have done this. No, maybe not. I've always it's interesting because I also have to contradict myself because I've always argued as a at as a Dutch person I should work on something that is at least a little bit distant from me. I know I'm still European in Italy, it's just it's a 10-hour drive away, but for me that was a different kind of culture than the culture I grew up in.

SPEAKER_00 33:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:11

And now I I tried to work on the culture that preceded me, and the at least in the country where I grew up in, which at once is it means easy to do, sort of language-wise. And I know from elementary school I know the places and all these kinds of things I learned that that was easy, and at the same time, it's really difficult because it means that I have to absorb myself also into a part of Dutch culture that I I don't particularly like. So I have no personal interest in the polder in drained land, and that's where I grew up in. I didn't like it at all. I think it's windy, it's cold, I like trees, I like forests, hills, I like. I grew up in the northeastern part of the country, which is a completely different landscape than where I live now. Yeah, but it's part of a turn in the professional career that I also really enjoy. I still do work on Italian art in a sort of comparative fashion that I'm trying to do. I think it helps me that I come from that background and also keeps me a little bit sane. So it's not that I'm not writing some kind of autobiographical art history.

SPEAKER_00 34:32

Fair enough. I have I've started working a little bit on colonial American art and things. I found it very interesting. I found that it's forced me to think about my own relationship to being American, which is interesting. So, final question What in your life right now is giving you deep pleasure outside of your academic work?

SPEAKER_01 34:55

My children, I think, first of all. I mean, they because of the kind of questions that they ask, the kind of interests that they have that are thankfully also a little bit different than what I like. I always drag them to a museum so they're used to that kind of stuff. But they ask really good questions and they're really fun to hang out with. They're sort of my relaxation time after and before work and in the weekends. How old are your kids? They're eight, eleven, and fourteen.

SPEAKER_00 35:28

Oh, that's nice.

SPEAKER_01 35:29

Yeah, so they now come with their own interests and things that they like. So that's one of the things that I really enjoy. And it's it also makes you it makes me think differently about my work. I find it really difficult to distinguish my life between work and non-work. It's because I like art and now I'm also working on nature, which I happen to like. That's a sort of autobiographical thing in there. I don't think I would ever work on on children portraits or something, but uh god, no. But who knows?

SPEAKER_00 36:06

Childhood. Yeah, I feel the same way. My seven-year-old, I remember his pediatrician said to me that it starts to get really fun because you see them start all these activities and try all these different things out. And it's true, it's really lovely. I went skiing with him yesterday and I saw him, I saw the way that he skis. Like he's cautious, but he's good, and he makes his little turns, and he's very thoughtful, and and it was just very sweet to see that. It's wonderful to see them become their own people.

SPEAKER_01 36:37

Yeah, yeah, I think that's what I like. You first try to teach them things, and you still try to as long as you can, but there's a moment when they start teaching you things, and that's when it starts around six or seven, and then it sort of accelerates. I like that aspect. And I like to run outside, run and bike, and just to keep me sane. It's what I do on my own, it's the only thing I really don't know.

SPEAKER_00 37:04

That's great. Well, thank you so much for talking with me, and I really look forward to seeing your book come out. Do you have a do you have a sense of where you are in your manuscript?

SPEAKER_01 37:13

Halfway, maybe. Yeah. That's all it's a realistic estimate, I think. I mean, I like to think of it as almost being done, but I think I'm halfway.

SPEAKER_00 37:24

I look forward to it. It'll be, as you said, there's so much work to do in the field of Dutch landscape, and I'm excited to see your book about when it does. Thanks. You too. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening to Iconoclast Art Histories. The music today was brought by Diego Mong. Sound editing was done by CJ De Gennaro, and additional support was provided by Noelle Jackson and Shauna Smalls.