Titelpagina voor: Derde Uytgaaf van de Gezichten van Cleefsland 1734 - 1774

Gerrit Tielenburg, a bookseller in Amsterdam, created this title page for the third edition of "Views of Clevesland" using letterpress printing. The act of creating and distributing ‘views’ takes on different meanings when we look at the time it was made. The book was created in the Netherlands during the period known as the Dutch Golden Age, when the Dutch Republic was a major economic and cultural power. How were the views mediated, and for whom? The commercial nature of Tielenburg's book suggests an audience keen to consume and perhaps even commodify images of land. It implies that even landscape, like other resources, was subject to the gaze and the interests of a rising merchant class, eager to map and frame their world. The blank space on the left of the cover is as intriguing as the text itself. It makes me wonder about the untold stories, the unseen perspectives, and the silences inherent in any representation. The image makes us reflect on the relationship between seeing, knowing, and possessing.