Esa­ias van de Velde, Dutch, 1587-1630

: River Landscape on a Hill, 1620 

For Van de Velde and these artists, the local sur­round­ings served as their most impor­tant source of inspi­ra­tion instead of the vast dra­mat­ic sweeps of moun­tain­ous (and often fan­tas­ti­cal) views pre­ferred by pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions. This draw­ing offers pre­cise­ly one such view, with a herder march­ing his fl ock up a hill along what appears to be the embank­ment of a river or estu­ary. This is some­what hilly ter­rain, not to be found in the province of Hol­land itself. It could have been inspired by trav­els far­ther afi eld, such as along the Scheldt estu­ary to the south, or sim­ply a view con­jured from his imag­i­na­tion. He used near­ly the same com­po­si­tion­al for­mu­la for a black chalk draw­ing in the Lou­vre prob­a­bly made a few years later Fig. 10.1.2

Van de Velde often sought sub­tle per­spec­ti­val effects in his land­scapes, such as those pro­duced by the near­ly blank sky in the Peck draw­ing. It is remark­ably effec­tive in sug­gest­ing deep dis­tance past the rise in the hill, an aspect aided by the care­ful place­ment of the water and dis­tant hills in the lower right to gen­er­ate a sense of an unseen hori­zon behind the main composition. 

Esa­ias often signed his draw­ings but did not always date them. His inclu­sion of the year on this work proves sig­nif­i­cant because it is his only known draw­ing dated 1620. The vast major­i­ty of his pen and ink draw­ings date to the 1610s, a decade when he pri­mar­i­ly worked in Haar­lem. After mov­ing to The Hague in 1618, he enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly took to explor­ing the use of black chalk for his draw­ings.3

Only a few of his sheets in pen and ink are thought to date to this later peri­od after he left Haar­lem, includ­ing anoth­er work in the Peck Col­lec­tion.4

Esa­ias added a humor­ous touch to this image with the fig­ure of a man defe­cat­ing in the lower left cor­ner while his canine com­pan­ion waits patient­ly by his side. The motif of depict­ing a fig­ure engaged in such activ­i­ty has a long tra­di­tion in Nether­lan­dish art.5

Accord­ing to Karel van Man­der, Joachim Patinir (1480 – 1524) gar­nered the nick­name kakker (poop­er) for his habit of plac­ing a small fig­ure reliev­ing him­self in his land­scape paint­ings.6

The motif is rel­a­tive­ly rare in Esa­ias’s works, although he used it on at least one other occa­sion.7

The Haar­lem artist Jan van de Velde II (1593 – 1641), who was per­haps Esa­ias’s dis­tant cousin, turned the motif into the pri­ma­ry sub­ject of a print from a series treat­ing the rig­ors of trav­el Fig. 10.2.8

Par­tic­u­lar­ly amus­ing in Esa­ias’s draw­ing is the pres­ence of the out­house perched on the ledge at the top of the rise. Appar­ent­ly, the trav­el­er com­plete­ly missed its pres­ence — which would have been oppor­tune — or he sim­ply could not be both­ered to reach it.