LONDON.- This exhibition of 42 paintings draws on
the Royal Collection’s rich holdings of Dutch 17th-century landscapes, including
works by Jacob van Ruisdael, Aelbert Cuyp, Jan van der Heyden and Meyndert
Hobbema. By the 17th century, landscape painting was well established
as a distinct art form and one in which Netherlandish artists excelled. The fine
detail and meticulous finish of Dutch pictures appealed to British taste, and 34
of the works in the exhibition were acquired by George IV when Prince Regent
between 1809 and 1820. The ability of Dutch artists to depict mood and emotion
through landscape and the subject matter drawn from everyday life influenced the
great British painters John Constable and JMW Turner. Constable admired the
‘acres of sky expressed’ in Ruisdael’s Evening Landscape: A Windmill by a
Stream, and on seeing a seascape by Willem van de Velde the Younger, Turner
remarked, ‘Ah! That made me a painter’.