Boerenhoeve 1844 - 1845

This drawing of a farmstead was made by Barend Cornelis Koekkoek, one of the most important landscape artists of the Netherlands during the Romantic era. Koekkoek renders this rural scene with great detail, but he seems less interested in its realities than in its value as a symbol of the Netherlands’s past. The drawing appears to reference back to the Dutch Golden Age, a time of great prosperity for the Dutch Republic. In the nineteenth century, this historical period was seized upon and mythologized, gaining importance in newly forming ideas about Dutch national identity. As an art historian, I am interested in what this image reveals about the cultural construction of the Dutch landscape. We might ask, for instance, how the image may have served the aims of the state, or how Dutch art academies influenced landscape painters like Koekkoek.