Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice

Figure 3. Camelis Vroom, Landscape with a River by a Wood, signed and dated 1626. Panel, 31.3 X 44.2 em. National Gallery, London (3475).
In Roelandt Savery's Landscape with Animals and Figures (1624), an area for
the foreground group of figure and animals was held in reserve while the
landscape was painted; only the small figures to the rear are painted over the
landscape (Fig. 2). The foreground of this work is painted with final details
in a typical transparent brown over a warm brown underpaint. In the lighter
middle ground of this painting, the same transparent brown is used for the
details over passages of tan underpaint; in a passage underpainted in gray, such
as the stream at the left, the details are worked up in rapidly sketched strokes
of darker gray paint.
Landscape in Haarlem in the 1620s
By the 1620s, a number of Dutch painters had taken up landscape as a specialty.
In contrast to the fantasy landscapes of the Mannerists, these paintings
represented recognizable scenes of the local countryside. The colors are limited,
the compositions rely on subtle atmospheric effects to create almost
continuous recession into space, and the figures no longer play a significant
role. The techniques of landscape painting in this early period are varied, but
there is evidence that those Haarlem artists who were most adventuresome
compositionally also incorporated new ways of handling paint, methods
which became integral to the effects of the "tonal landscape" painters in the
1630s.
Comelis Vroom painted the Landscape with a River by a Wood, a work now
in London, in 1626 (Fig. 3) . This Haarlem landscape artist did not participate
in the tonal style in the next decade, but in this early landscape, Vroom
modified Flemish practice to create a more subtle spatial recession with his
characteristic color range dominated by browns, yellows, and grayish greens.
The color of each area is established using an underpaint, following the Flem-
Giff ord 143