Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice

at the beginning of the seventeenth century, naturalistic landscape painters
must have shared with their fellow citizens a newly awakened appreciation
for the beauties of the local scene. As business people, they supplied and
developed a new market governed by this taste. As practitioners of painting,
they developed new working methods, which were both economical and
superbly suited to expressing their new aesthetic.
Notes
1. Briels,J. G. C. A. 1976. De zuidnederlandse inmugrantie in Amsterdam en Haarlem
omstreeks 1572-1630. PhD. diss. Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht.
2. Bengtsson, A. 1952. Studies on the Rise of Realistic Landscape Painting in Holland
1610-1625. Figure 3.
3. Brown, C. 1986. Introduction. In Dutch Landscape, The Early Years: Haarlem and
Amsterdam 1590- 1 650. Exhibition catalogue. London: The National Gallery, 11-
34.
4. Freedberg, D. 1980. Dutch Landscape Prints of the Seventeenth Century. London.
5. I am grateful fo r the opportunity to have studied paintings in the collections of
the Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem; the National Gallery, London; the National
Gallery of Art, Washington; and the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore. I would
particularly like to thank Ashok Roy of the National Gallery and Ella Hendriks
of the Frans Halsmuseum for their assistance. I appreciate very much the many
discussions of this material that I have had with Arthur K. Wheelock,Jr. Paintings
included in the study were exanuned with a stereonLicroscope, and with X­
radiography and infrared reflectography, where available. Paint analysis was carried
out on a linuted number of dispersed pigment samples and paint cross sections
by light nLicroscopy and scanning electron nucroscopy with energy dispersive X­
ray spectroscopy (SEM/EDS). The compositions of paint mediums were estimated
only using biological stains on the cross sections. Additional paintings were
exanLined visually to study the handling of paint.
6. A survey of several Dutch landscapes from the 1620s and the "tonal" period can
be found in Bomford, D. Te chniques of the early Dutch landscape painters. In
Brown, op. cit., 45-56.
7. This painting was sampled by Feliciry Campbell during conservation treatment
in 1988.
8. This painting closely replicates the primary version now at the J. Paul Getry
Museum, Malibu (92.PB82).
9. From the samples, it is not clear whether the underdrawing lies under or over
the imprimatura.
10. Coninxioo died in 1607. Savery left Amsterdam for Prague, where he served the
Emperor Rudolf II until about 1613, when he returned to Amsterdam. In 1619
he moved to Utrecht, where he worked until his death in 1639.
11. Historisches Museum der Pfalz, Speyer (H. M.1957/122). Illustrated in Sutton,
p. C. 1987. Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Painting. Exhibition
catalogue. Amsterdam: RijksmuseuIT1; Boston: Museum of Fine Arts; Philadelphia
Museum of Fine Arts. Plate 1.
12. A ground of black, toned with a little yellow earth and rubbed into the poplar
support, was observed on the original section of Farms Flanking a Frozen Canal,
1614, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh (52.9.61). See Goist, D. C. 1990.
Case study of an early Dutch landscape. lCOM Committee fo r Conservation preprints,
9th Triennial Meeting, 648-52.
13. Gifford, E. M. 1983. A technical investigation of some Dutch seventeenth-century
tonal landscapes. AlC preprints, 39-49.
14. Montias,J. M. 1987. Cost and value in seventeenth-century Dutch art. Art History
10:455-66.
Gifford 147