Focus on the Peck Collection: Imagined Landscapes

August 23, 2024 - November 10, 2024

An imagined countryside landscape in shades of brown, depicting a river scene with a windmill, boats, people, and animals

Before the emergence of landscape as its own subject in Europe during the late sixteenth century, medieval and Renaissance artists crafted fantastical landscape backdrops for biblical and mythological subjects. Though artists in the seventeenth century, particularly in the Netherlands, increasingly studied the natural world and recorded existing views of their surrounding environs, painters and draftsmen often reordered, refashioned, or completely transformed observed elements, creating picturesque scenes that were conceived rather than experienced. This Focus on the Peck Collection installation presents three seventeenth-century drawings whose topographical specificity, atmospheric realism, and pictorial plausibility make it difficult to distinguish reality from imagination.

Image credit:
Michiel Carrée, Dutch, 1657-1727, River Scene with a Windmill, c. 1675-85, pen and brush in brown ink over traces of black chalk on paper, 6 3/8 x 9 3/4 in. (16.2 x 24.7 cm). The Peck Collection, 2017.1.17.