The naturalistic treatment of the landscape background in the religious
pictures of Jan van Eyck and his successors, Memlinc, Bouts, Hugo van
der Goes, and other painters in the Netherlands, in time brought about
the promotion of landscape painting to an independent art. Among the
earlier Dutch artists who approached the study of Nature were Arent
Arentzen (1586?-1635?), as we see from his _Landscape with a Fisherman_
(No. 2300A), and Roeland Roghman, who was born a year later than Jan
van Goyen, and lived as late as 1685. He painted the _Landscape_ (No.
2555B), which was formerly in the Paul Mantz collection. Indeed,
several Dutchmen of the period sought to commit to panel views of
nature, as in the case of Pieter de Bloot (1600-1652), who gives us a
_Landscape with a River_ (No. 2327B).
The romantic feeling which so often pervades the background of
Rembrandt’s paintings, and is so apparent in such etchings as the
_Three Trees_, can only be touched on here. This new tendency is best
exemplified in the works of Jan van Goyen (1596-1656), who may be
regarded as the founder of a self-centred school of landscape painting
in Holland; but it was his ever handy sketch-book that enabled him to
outstrip his rivals in this branch of Dutch art. He is seen to great
advantage in his very fine _Banks of a Dutch River_ (No. 2375), his
superb _River View with eight Men in a Boat_ (No. 2378), a signed and
dated work of 1649, a large light-brown-toned _River in Holland_ (No.
2377), a good _Banks of a Canal_ (No. 2379), as well as a _Dutch Canal_
(No. 2376) and a _Dutch River_ (No. 2377).
[Illustration:
PLATE XXXVI.—JAN VER MEER VAN DELFT
(1632-1675)