Heuvellandschap met beek 1815 - 1867

Willem van Dielen made this etching, "Heuvellandschap met beek," or "Hilly landscape with stream," in the Netherlands sometime in the mid-19th century. Landscape prints like this were very popular in the Netherlands at this time. The Dutch middle class had money to spend and an appetite for art that reflected their own experiences of the countryside. But it is important to remember that the Dutch landscape was as much cultural as it was natural. From the 17th century onward, Dutch people had radically reshaped their natural environment by building canals, polders, and dikes. Landscape art often served to legitimize the relationship between a country's people and its land. Van Dielen was an active member of the Pulchri Studio, a visual arts society in The Hague. It's interesting to research the ways that such groups exhibited, promoted, and marketed the kind of landscape imagery we see here. This helps us to understand landscape not just as a scene, but as a cultural product.