Winter Landscape

In 1612 two landscape artists, Hercules Seghers and Esaias van de Velde joined the painters' guild in Haarlem, and it is from that year that the origins of realistic landscape painting in the north Netherlands can be dated. Esaias was born in Amsterdam in about 1590 and probably trained in the studio of Gillis van Coninxloo, an Antwerp landscape painter and follower of Pieter Bruegel the Elder; who had fled to the north as a Protestant refugee from the war in Flanders. Esaias van de Velde developed Coninxloo's style in the direction of greater realism.

As can be seen in this small panel of 1623, his mature style is characterized by a striking naturalism created by free brushwork and a deliberately restricted palette. The mannerisms of Flemish landscape have disappeared to leave an image which conveys all the crispness of an icy winter day in Holland. The figures are sketched in sure, quick strokes, the landscape evoked in pigments thinly scraped across the still-visible gesso ground. Van de Velde also studied the work of Adam Elsheimer, the German painter who moved to Rome in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Esaias would have known Elsheimer's paintings in the form of prints and it is from them that he derives his low viewpoint and the triangular composition.

At the same time as the powerful and naturalistic landscapes of Seghers and Esaias van de Velde were being created in Haarlem, Esaias's cousin, Jan van de Velde, was at work in the town engraving his delicate landscapes, and Cornelis Vroom was creating his understated but remarkably innovative paintings and prints based on the countryside around the town. Among Esaias's pupils was Jan van Goyen who was further to develop and refine his master's style.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 11 minutes): Vivaldi: Concerto in F minor RV 297 op. 8 No. 4 (Winter)