Koeien in een landschap 1788 - 1814

Jan Kobell II created this drawing, "Cows in a Landscape", sometime around the turn of the nineteenth century in the Netherlands. At this time, Dutch art had long been associated with a commitment to realism, and the kind of rural scenes that Kobell here represents. But there's a social history to be told here. While the Netherlands had long been the home of a wealthy mercantile class, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a time of political turmoil. It witnessed both the decline of the Dutch East India Company and the rise of a centralized, French-dominated state. With this in mind, we might ask: what is the public role of Kobell's art? Does the image comment on these changing social structures? Is this landscape self-consciously conservative, harking back to an imagined past of Dutch independence? Or does it critique the institutions of art? These are the questions that art historians ask. By consulting archives, libraries, and other resources, we can come to better understand the meaning of art as something that is contingent on social and institutional context.