Muiderberg, van de Hooge Weg af gezien 1762

Jacob Cats made this drawing of Muiderberg from the Hooge Weg in the late eighteenth century using pen in brown and gray, brush in gray, and black chalk. This quiet scene of figures in a landscape, with a village church tower in the distance, is a study in the picturesque. The picturesque aesthetic was cultivated by a growing middle class who took to landscape as a form of leisure. The term itself signals a specific engagement with landscape as if it were a picture, carefully framed, and consumed as scenery. In the Dutch Republic, where the merchant class held considerable sway, the arts became increasingly oriented to their tastes and proclivities. To better understand Cats’s art, we need to research the economic structures that made this art possible, the relevant cultural trends that shaped the public taste, and the institutional settings, such as the art market, in which it circulated.