ABSTRACT
The Dutch interest in landscape, still life, and even genre was already apparent in fifteenth-century Flanders. In seventeenth-century Holland, with the development of landscape as an independent category of painting, artists generally depicted panoramic views expressing the flatness of Dutch topography through vast expanses of sky and distant horizons. In the works of Johannes Vermeer, genre scenes—apparently of everyday life—combine aspects of landscape and still life with a new intensity. The curtain, combining the reds, blues, and yellows present elsewhere on the canvas, is drawn aside, revealing the intimacy and quiet concentration of artist and model. Jacob van Ruisdael has monumentalized the mill so that, like the medieval Gothic cathedrals, it dominates the landscape, carries the gaze upward toward the sky, and transforms architecture into an image of cultural power. Dutch still-life painting of the seventeenth century approaches the world from a different point of view than landscape painting.
