For Dutch artists, their country's carefully reclaimed landscape has special significance, as a new exhibition shows. Aidan Dunne reports
Given the subdued nature of much of the terrain, its relative lack of drama, it is surprising how landscape has featured so centrally as subject matter in Dutch art. Entirely by design, it is a consistent thread in Figure and Ground: Rembrandt to Mondrian at the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork which is subtitled Landscape and People in Netherlands Art 1520-1920. The show, curated by Peter Murray and Anne Boddaert, features works on paper from our own National Gallery as well as from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, England's Chatsworth House, and elsewhere.
While the focus of Figure and Ground is deliberate, both landscape and people are inescapable in any overview of Dutch art. Not only is the Netherlands densely populated - famously so - but the land itself has a special significance for its inhabitants because so much of it has been fought for, and not only in the conventional martial sense.
From the 16th century onwards the Dutch have been fighting the sea, struggling for existence against the threat of flooding, coping with disasters, and living on ground that has been won from the waves. With this prodigious effort and its requisite skills went an appreciation of the land, which was and is used, as the received wisdom about Holland has it, jealously and industriously. Which brings us to another aspect of Netherlands art: why there is so much of it.
Holland is, as Polish writer Zbigniew Herbert put it, "the kingdom of things, great principality of objects . . . The attachment to things was so great that pictures and portraits of objects were commissioned as if to confirm their existence and prolong their lives". This is not just rampant materialism, though obviously that comes into it. There is an evident fascination with the way things are, a hunger to document and describe.
In drawings by Rembrandt, and by others whose names do not spring so readily to the lips - such as Jan van Goyen, Hendrick Avercamp, Joos de Momper and Pieter Molijn - the everyday is rendered with rapt precision. Rembrandt is a virtuoso, economic with line. His drawings have a fast, casual, calligraphic quality: a rhythmic scribble becomes a distant hedgerow or a line of reeds at water's edge.
On the other hand, there is an earnest, childlike exactness to Avercamp's patient rendering of a manorial farmhouse and its surroundings. The drawing has something of the quality of a scale model. A remarkable amount of practical detail is packed in unobtrusively. The house itself is big, but functional rather than grand. In a field behind a wattle fence, peasants are sowing. Hens and pigs forage in the foreground. Two men make their way past en route to some kind of labour. A woman standing by the gate holds an infant in her arms. Avercamp relishes each component, slotting them all together to make a coherent working model. You will find many variations of this busy pastoral scene in the exhibition, all crowded with incident, all richly informative and visually absorbing.
Such landscape and genre scenes ranked far lower than history painting and consequently demanded lower prices. There was a huge market for art in the Netherlands during the early 17th century. In contrast to the usual state of affairs, the ordinary rules of patronage didn't really apply and collecting was not the preserve of the rich and the privileged. Everyone bought paintings, but even so supply exceeded demand.
VAN GOYEN DIED bankrupt. Restless, nomadic, prolific, on the face of it he should have been financially successful. But he sold his work for little more than the cost of the materials that went into making it. He had to lose. And he didn't fare any better by speculating in property and tulips. Herbert relates that in the artistic circles of the time, the joke about him was that the only sensible transaction he managed was in engineering the marriage of his daughter to the financially astute painter, Jan Steen.
From the art of the Golden Age the exhibition essentially leaps forwards in time, to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As Murray explains, this section of the show, which concentrates largely on Jan Toorop and Piet Mondrian, elucidates another layer of meaning in the title Figure and Ground. As Toorop and then Mondrian progressively formalise a familiar subject matter, working towards the latter's rigorous abstraction, the distinction between subject and background, figure and ground, dissolves.
The Gemeentemusuem in The Hague houses a fantastic Mondrian collection, and it has provided several works. They are generally larger than their companions from the preceding centuries. This, together with Mondrian's lively engagement and inventive drive, threatens the balance of the show. His section is like a show within a show. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given that his progression from representation to abstraction is one of the clearest, most closely argued and logical in the history of art, his interest in theosophical spirituality notwithstanding.
What Figure and Ground demonstrates very effectively is the extent to which Mondrian's development was grounded in his artistic and historical heritage. The flat, ordered, carefully husbanded Netherlands we find in the work of van Goyen and Avercamp seems perfectly in accord with Mondrian's dream of a visual language of universal harmony.
Figure and Ground: Rembrandt to Mondrian runs at Cork's Crawford Municipal Art Gallery until Apr 2 (tel: 021-4907857)