Esaias van de Velde
1587–1630 · Dutch Republic · Dutch Golden Age, Landscape painting
The story
Around 1615, in Haarlem, painters were doing something new with the flat Dutch countryside: painting it for its own sake. Esaias van de Velde was one of the people who made that turn. He dropped the crowded, story-filled scenery earlier artists favoured and gave the picture over to the land itself, with a low horizon, a wide sky, and a road or a frozen canal leading the eye in.
He joined the Haarlem painters' guild in 1612 and worked with a small group, his nephew Jan van de Velde and Willem Buytewech among them, who together loosened landscape from anecdote.
His deepest mark may be a pupil. In his Haarlem workshop he trained Jan van Goyen, who would carry the plain, tonal Dutch landscape to its height. Esaias moved to The Hague in 1618 and worked there until his death in 1630.
