ABSTRACT
The advanced artists turned their backs on the traditional Flemish Mannerist, schematized landscape representation and started to look around them and to record what they saw, first in drawings and prints, soon afterward in paintings. Jan Porcellis represents a long step beyond Vroom and the other early realists in terms of the general line of development of Dutch painting. Esaias van de Velde represents the other tendency, the new naturalistic Dutch outlook on landscape. Ian van Goyen, for example, painted numerous coastal scenes and purely marine subjects. Like other artists in the structural or monumental phase of landscape painting, Jacob van Ruisdael employed color schemes more intense than those of the masters of the tonal landscape, with sharper contrasts in values adding boldness and strength to the composition. Philips Wouwerman, who painted a vast number of scenes involving horses—battles, travelers, blacksmith shops—also made the horse as such the subject of some of his most impressive compositions.
