May (Maius) 1628 - 1629

Wenceslaus Hollar created this etching, titled "May", likely in the mid-17th century. It presents a scene of leisure and pastoral beauty, but how might this image speak to its particular moment? Made in the context of the early modern period, the image evokes a sense of idealized nature, which we know was increasingly appreciated as a space of recreation and status display by the rising merchant classes of the Netherlands and England. Hollar, who was working in England, may have been influenced by his own exile and nostalgia for his homeland of Bohemia. Note the detailed rendering of the landscape and figures which evokes the fashion of the time. To understand the image better, one would want to research the significance of pastoral imagery in 17th-century European culture. The print participates in the construction of social values and notions of the good life. The meaning of art is inextricably linked to its social and institutional context.