Gezicht op Kleef 1730

Abraham Zeeman made this print of Kleef with etching. Prints like these were the mass media of their time. This particular image emphasizes the orderly, urban environment, its buildings neatly arranged along the river. But we shouldn’t see this as an objective record. The composition serves to enhance the status of the town, and the church in particular is made to look both impressive and imposing, suggesting a well-ordered and powerful society. We might want to compare Zeeman’s depiction with written sources of the period, particularly administrative and civic records, to better understand the reality of life in Kleef at the time. The politics of imagery are complex, and what we see in a picture is not always the whole story. Historians use archives and textual evidence to better understand the social conditions that shape artistic production.