Ooievaars en eenden bij een poel 1580 - 1625

Jan van Londerseel made this engraving of storks and ducks by a pool sometime in the late 16th or early 17th century. These kinds of images depicting natural scenes gained popularity, particularly in the Netherlands. Consider the cultural references here: the Dutch landscape, with its waterways and native fauna, becomes a subject worthy of artistic attention. You might ask, what’s at stake in creating value around this imagery? Was the artist commenting on the social structures of his time? Printmaking as an industry was taking off, and artists were experimenting with the power of reproducible images. This engraving, for example, might have been included in a series of prints, or it could have been bound in a book of similar images. To fully understand this artwork, we must reflect on art as something contingent on social and institutional context.