Dutch art in the English landscape: seventeenth-century Dutch landscape prints in the London art market 1740–1800

© 2016 Dr. Kathleen KiernanThis thesis examines the circulation of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape prints in London in the eighteenth century and their contribution to the emergence of British landscape art. A critical analysis of annotated catalogues – predominantly from Christie’s archive in London, the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings and the British Library – indicate a significant number of landscape prints by Dutch artists, as well as many reproductive Dutch landscape prints by English artist-engravers, were bought and sold on the open market. Likewise, close examination of James Hughes Anderdon’s grangerised volumes A Complete Series of the Exhibition Catalogues of the Society of Artists of Great Britain, from 1760 to 1791, also held in the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings, sheds new light on the critical reaction many members of this Society had to Dutch landscape prints. It will be shown that printsellers, artists and collectors, who resided largely in and around Covent Garden, participated in competitive bidding for Dutch landscape prints so that they could command a role in promoting this popular commodity. I argue that these British artists experimented with the relatively new techniques of etching developed by the seventeenth-century Haarlem artist-engravers, and appropriated compositional elements from these prints. I explore the above primary sources in the context of the early decades of the Society of Artists in Great Britain, the Free Society of Artists and the Royal Academy of Arts. In my final analysis I identify motifs, themes, and techniques that originated in seventeenth-century Dutch landscape art, and follow their transition into the British landscape aesthetic of the eighteenth century. The prints highlight the shared values underlying anti-Papist sentiment that flowed through images of God expressed through nature. This study aims to encourage reflection on the contribution Dutch landscape prints made to British landscape art through the activity of print sellers, publishers, collectors and artists. It reveals how their work and taste departed from their Dutch predecessors to create a distinctive British landscape art