Pleasant Places: The Rustic Landscape from Bruegel to Ruisdael. .

Walter S. Gibson. Pleasant Places: The Rustic Landscape from Bruegel to Ruisdael. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. xxviii + 292 pp. + 16 color pls. illus. index. bibi. $55. ISBN: 0-520-21698-9.

This fluidly written and handsomely illustrated book is a pleasant sequel indeed to Gibson's Mirror of the Earth (1989), a detailed study of the sixteenth-century transformations of the panoramic landscape invented by Joachim Parinir. Here, Gibson turns his attentive surveying eye to "the rustic landscape" from the late 1 550s through the 1670s. He positions the rustic landscape representation "somewhere between the carefully wrought order of the formal garden and the forest or other wildness untouched by human presence" (xxiv): prosaic in its scenery and staffage, it is recognizably Netherlandish though not necessarily topographic. Loosely defined as such, the genre includes a wide range of pictures, from the foundational Small Landscapes published in 1559 by Hieronymus Cock, through the multiple print series of the 1610s of the local land around Haarlem, to the dunes and hovels of Jan van Goyen and the gnarled trees of Jacob van Ruisdael. Gibson's brief is to sort out the ways in which these lowland pictur es meant for their viewers: a daunting task, given the plurality of debate about the historicist way to view pictures of the local scene. Gibson is a sure-footed guide through this rocky terrain, and his summaries and contestation of the different interpretations will be welcome to specialists and graduate students.

Although the subtitle promises Bruegel and Ruisdael--and there is material here to prompt modest rethinking of those artists as of the landscape inventions of Rembrandt, Goltzius, and the Bloemaerts--the focus of the book is on the heroic moment of early seventeenth-century landscape prints and paintings (in that order) in the Dutch Republic. The most innovative proponents of the rustic landscape, and this is no surprise, are the great Haarlem printmakers of the first quarter of the seventeenth century: Claes Jansz Visscher first and foremost, but also Willem Buytewech and the cousins Esaias and Jan II van de Velde. Van Goyen's less specific Haarlem dunes are tightly treated as heirs of the prints. Although the argument is nor new, Gibson demonstrates fully that, having been born in Antwerp, the rustic landscape had "its true coming of age," in Haarlem (116).

Conversant as few others with landscape representation in sixteenth-century Anrwerp, Gibson adeptly sorts out the complex relationships between the two series of Small Landscapes, published by Hieronymus Cock in 1559-61, and the Haarlem series indebted to it issued half a century later. Visscher's Plaisante Plaetsen (Pleasant Places, ca. 1611-12) was the fountainhead of a steady stream of knock-offs, published by Visscher and others, and chapters 1 and 2 diligently lay out the issues of attribution, precedence, and filiation besetting our understanding of the genesis of the unassuming landscape print. Uninitiated readers will lose heart trying to make sense of these relationships, but the crucial circumstances for the development of the Haarlem landscape tradition emerge clearly. As Gibson argues, there is a direct line from Philips Galle's republication in 1601 of the Small Landscapes to Visscher's own etched copies of those series (1612) and his simultaneous creation of the Plaisante Plaetsen, thirteen vie ws of the dune landscape around Haarlem. Gibson astutely catalogues the pictorial similarities and differences between the Small Landscapes and their Haarlem offspring: Visscher followed his models in rendering hamlets, paths, fields, inns, and diminutive rustic figures, but left our manors and castles, except for the ruinous House at Kieve of local historical fame.

In the book's central section, Gibson situates the Pleasant Places within the varied historical contexts of the early Dutch Republic and its struggle for political autonomy, rapid economic expansion and urban yearning for rustic relief, Haarlem's reputation for delightful countryside and heroic valor, and the long-lived tradition of landscape as locus amoenus for weary cirixens. In presenting the Dutch rustic landscape print as only the latest incarnation of the classical genre of the locus amoenus, as a pleasant place for vicarious walks and other rural pleasures, and as the mental site of otium, Gibson essentially rejects the "scriptural reading" of Dutch landscape. He devotes an entire chapter and numerous wry comments to disproving or weakening recent interpretations of Dutch landscape as in some way imbued with or communicative of Protestant or even specifically Calvinist values. The varied approaches that might be called "scriptural" are not fully differentiated here. Josua Bruyn's attempt to link motif s in landscape paintings to specific biblical texts and to reduce diverse landscape paintings to one and the same moral injunction is surely more problematic than the suggestions of others that Protestant emphasis on Creation as "God's First Book" was at least conducive to the production of humble landscape art in a Protestant culture that disavowed devotional images. The range of "scriptural reading" is wider than even these two examples indicate. Gibson does allow that seventeenth-century writers saw God in the natural detail, but he largely declines direct connections between Protesranrism and the rise and popularity of humble landscape.

Gibson's pluralistic view of seventeenth-century Dutch viewers fruitfully counters any simple distinctions between pietistic or humanist viewers (60-61). In an "Excursus" on "Painting for Pleasure," Gibson, an established scholar of comic painting, exuberantly details the antique roots and Renaissance revival of painting without overweening moral ambition. He weaves a delightful tapestry of instances of tolerance, even enjoyment, of pleasurable activities and pictures, in an emphasis on the secular pioneered by the Annales school. Many of his examples concern laughter and ribaldry, and although these offer salutary reminders of the levity of our forebears the relevance of these sentiments to frequently humorless rustic landscape remains oblique. In Dutch landscape the rural carnivalesque of a Bruegel is reduced to the status of side act, if it is included at all.

Rustic otium may have been an ancient need, but its pictorial forms in the seventeenth century were historically contingent. Drawing on anecdotal sources, Gibson describes how the countryside rapidly became a physical and mental "urban playground" for the citizen elite (114). A discussion of the rise of the country house situates the appreciation of landscape representation in an upper-class realm of armchair recreation. In his most original discussion, Gibson notes that in this congested environment even the "rustic ruin" could become charming. He compellingly sees the new pictorial attachment to run-down hovels as a brief moment in the history of the picturesque. Critical analysis of the class-based character of this aesthetic would have been welcome, for the shed-dweller surely did not share the Dutch humanist's envy of his carefree existence.

Gibson's locally-specific passages make clear that a long tradition of rustic recreation cannot account for the sudden Dutch proclivity for recognizably local landscape. Even as it promotes Dutch identification and prompts religious reflection, this countryside of the imagination appears to try to restore a connection between culture and nature that the new urban landscape was sacrificing for economic growth. The taste for casual landscape in the Netherlands was fed by that conflicted development of the modern western understanding of "nature" as something at once alien, to be feared, to be conquered, and to be protected--a process fed by the socioeconomic realities and urban sentiments that Keith Thomas has charred for early modern English culture.