Over the course of his 35-year career, the Haarlem-based Dutch landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/29-1682) earned a peerless reputation for his ability to produce incredibly true-to-life paintings of trees, shrubs, and local vegetation. Later in his career, the artist turned to more heroic renditions of the Dutch countryside, as exemplified by his Haarlempjes (“Little Haarlem Pictures”) of the 1660s and 1670s. While the Haarlempjes embody Ruisdael’s conception of the landscape as a kind of map, his Wheat Fields (c. 1670), painted around the same time as his Haarlem views, conceives of the landscape as an ecosystem. In Wheat Fields, Ruisdael devotes his energies towards understanding the interactions between natural phenomena (as would an environmental scientist) rather than towards elucidating the spatial relationships of the world around him (as would a cartographer).

Many scholars have studied the affinities between landscape painting and mapmaking in 17th-century Holland (see, in particular, Svetlana Alpers’s The Art of Describing). But what was it about Holland during the nation’s so-called Golden Age, and about the city of Haarlem in particular, that made Jacob van Ruisdael so sensitive to the ecology of his landscapes? Why would the artist paint Wheat Fields at a time when his cartographic landscapes like the Haarlempjes were so popular amongst local and international art lovers? By diving into the environmental history of early modern Holland, this project seeks to uncover the factors that made landscape painting a study of ecology in 17th-century Netherlands.