Abendvortrag: Jan van Goyen 'painting bad'

Dutch seventeenth-century landscape painting has often been characterized as schilderachtig – literally: ‘painterly.’ Referring to a certain looseness in the handling of the brush, the seemingly tautological and rarely critically discussed term also captures the idea that the landscape image ‘realistically’ renders the idiosyncrasies of the Dutch countryside, including the overcast skies, moist and windy atmospheric conditions, without any aesthetic or other value judgement about the appropriateness of these motifs for a work of art. The lecture argues that early in the 17th century, however, the term had specifically rhyparographic connotations related to the proverbial Hollandse botheid (‘Dutch rudeness’). In accordance, Jan van Goyen (1596-1656) and others began to depict base and even hideous aspects of the countryside not as the coincidental result of an indiscriminatory pictorial mimesis concept, but resulting from a preference for motifs of questionable ‘paint-worthiness’.