Don Quixote, Netherlandish Proverbs, grain fields in Ukraine, a flock of sheep in a boat, the Golden Horn, pastels and kabkabs.
Bruegel
Reading the history of agriculture in landscape paintings tells the story of the revolution that has taken place over the last 500 years.
A unique visual encyclopaedia featuring more than a hundred proverbs, followed by a similar compendium of children’s games.
Remember the water cycle from school? Here’s the grandfather of such explanatory diagrams, told in one of the first modern landscape paintings.
Staffage – people, animals, birds, carts and ships – make a big difference to many landscape paintings. Have you met the Wanderer too?
Superb paintings by Bruegel, Samuel Palmer, Daubigny, Jules Breton, Anna Ancher, Félix Vallotton, and others.
Paintings of windmills from Hieronymus Bosch, Rembrandt, Jacob van Ruisdael, Thomas Girtin, and others.
Escorts of valkyries, the bird of the gibbet, and seeker of carrion: crows and ravens are associated with death, magic, and more.
The popular story told concisely by Ovid, and painted brilliantly by van Dyck, Leighton, Rubens, Brueghel, and others.
Are they part of a narrative, or staffage? Do they provide scale, or enhance the effect? Are the figures part of the landscape, or even the landscape itself?
The Eclectic Light Company 