CODART Canon

Plaisante Plaetsen

Claes Jansz. Visscher, 1610 — 1620

These remarkable etchings of places in the surroundings of Haarlem are the first prints depicting northern Dutch landscapes. These popular destinations in the early seventeenth century were immortalized on copperplate by Claes Jansz. Visscher – one of the pioneers who went out into nature to study what he saw there. The results of his exploratory expeditions around his own country, committed to paper, would not be out of place in a tourism agency’s advertising campaign. He recorded the rural surroundings of Haarlem, which still bore the unmistakable scars of the Spanish occupation, in incisive strokes of the etching needle. Just as in the so-called Small Landscapes (also in the CODART Canon), published over fifty years earlier, his subjects featured country lanes with a few scattered buildings, trees, and here and there a rambler – sometimes even with a figure, presumably the artist, drawing in the foreground. This print series identifies the Amsterdam printmaker as an important link in a genre that would develop into a major specialism in Dutch art.

— Mireille Linck, Junior curator of prints, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam