Watermill at the Foot of a Mountain

The apparent ordinariness of Dutch landscape art has often led people to understand it as an objective, naturalistic depiction of things seen. However, any claim of "slavish copying" of reality has to be rejected in light of the many aspects of seventeenth-century Dutch life that are omitted from landscape scenes: industrial labor, for example, or large-scale infrastructure projects such as draining the land and constructing canals. The fact that many Dutch artists opted in favor of bucolic subject matter may demonstrate the transmission of the ancient Greek and Roman pastoral tradition to northern Europe by way of Italy. Karel van Mander, an influential sixteenth-century writer on art, urged Dutch artists to study Venetian landscapes; Rembrandt is believed to have owned some.