The Role of Social Changes in Developing Landscape Painting in the 17th Century Netherlands

One of the issues which helps painters have a better understanding of history of art, is the history of how the artistic genres formed. In this regard, the content of a given genre and the historical setting in which it was started to form (both in terms of time and place) paly major role. The idea of urbanism growth in the 17th century Netherlands led to a gap between man and nature. In order to alleviate the effect of this regretful situation, Dutch painters started to create landscape paintings, depending on the public taste, of pristine nature of the Netherlands. What did motivate the Dutch painters to create landscape paintings is the specific question the present study tries to answer it. In fact, this research aimed to give a better understanding of landscape painting of the 17th century Netherlands and the factors affected on it. In this connection, the book Landscape into Art by Kenneth Clark(1991) has exclusively addressed the historical course of landscape painting from the Renaissance to the late 19th century introducing prominent painters of this genre. Landscape and Western Art by Malcolm Andrews(2009) is another book dealing with different visions and pictures of nature catered since the Renaissance on.