An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. Martha HollanderArt and Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt. Mariët Westermann
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 charted for early modern English culture. MARIET WESTERMANN Institute of Fine Arts, New York