03 — ARTWORK
Landscape with Peasants Resting
- MEDIUM
- Oil on canvas, 91 x 133 cm
- TYPE
- Landscape
PALETTE
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- FILE
- 600 × 432 px · JPEG
COMMENTARY
UNDERLINED TERMS ARE DEFINED IN THE GLOSSARY.
Bloemaert lived to the age of almost ninety. He was a contemporary of Rembrandt and yet he belonged to the generation of Rembrandt's teachers. He was the leading representative of the Utrecht Mannerists and the director and founder of the Utrecht GuildAn association of the masters of a particular craft, trade or profession (painters, goldsmiths, surgeons, and so on) set up to protect its members' rights and interests. Such guilds existed in virtually every European city in the 16th century. The guild also monitored standards of work, acted as a court for those who brought their trade into disrepute, and provided assistance to members in need. of St Luke, but he continued to work well into the BaroqueThe period in art history from about 1600 to about 1750. In this sense the term covers a wide range of styles and artists. In painting and sculpture there were three main forms of Baroque: (1) sumptuous display, a style associated with the Catholic Counter Reformation and the absolutist courts of Europe (Bernini, Rubens); (2) dramatic realism (Caravaggio); and (3) everyday realism, a development seen in particular in Holland (Rembrandt, Vermeer). In architecture, there was an emphasis on expressiveness and grandeur, achieved through scale, the dramatic use of light and shadow, and increasingly elaborate decoration. In a more limited sense the term Baroque often refers to the first of these categories. The development of the Baroque reflects the period's religious tensions (Catholic versus Protestant); a new and more expansive world view based on science and exploration; and the growth of absolutist monarchies. I7th century when a third generation of landscape painters was already emerging.
His peasant landscape contains certain Mannerist elements such as the large distance between the foreground objects and the sweeping horizon, or in the way in which he has united contrasts. The aspects of Bloemaert's work adopted by Dutch landscape painters are the picturesqueTerm covering a set of attitudes towards landscape, both real and painted, that flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It indicated an aesthetic approach that found pleasure in roughness and irregularity, and an attempt was made to establish it as a critical category between the 'beautiful' and the 'Sublime'. Picturesque scenes were thus neither serene (like the beautiful) nor awe-inspiring (like the Sublime), but full of variety, curious details, and interesting textures — medieval ruins were quintessentially Picturesque. Natural scenery tended to be judged in terms of how closely it approximated to the paintings of favoured artists such as Gaspard Dughet, and in 1801 the Supplement to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary by George Mason defined 'Picturesque as: 'what pleases the eye; remarkable for singularity; striking the imagination with the force of painting; to be expressed in painting; affording a good subject for a landscape; proper to take a landscape from.' The Picturesque Tour in search of suitable subjects was a feature of English landscape painting of the period, exemplified, for example, in the work of Girtin and (early in his career) of Turner, and the Picturesque generated a large literary output; much of it was pedantic and obsessive and it became a popular subject for satire. elements evident in his rendering of nature and architecture. The picturesque appeal of dilapidated cottages, damaged thatching, broken fences and rotten tree trunks were to become part and parcel of Netherlandish landscape painting.
Bloemaert's oeuvreThe complete body of works created by an artist. also forges a link between Flemish and Dutch painting. While his portrayals of mythological themes and biblical tales lean heavily on the syntax of the international Flemish Mannerists, the dramatic realismRealism (with an upper case "R"), also known as the Realist school, denotes a mid-nineteenth century art movement and style in which artists discarded the formulas of Neoclassicism and the theatrical drama of Romanticism to paint familiar scenes and events as they actually looked. Typically it involved some sort of sociopolitical or moral message, in the depiction of ugly or commonplace subjects. One of the main representatives and spokesmen was the painter Gustave Courbet. In the dispute about ways to represent reality, Realism rebelled against the idealistic and classicist tendencies in painting. of his rural genreIn a broad sense, the term is used to mean a particular branch or category of art; landscape and portraiture, for example, are genres of painting, and the essay and the short story are genres of literature. paintings influenced the Dutch artists. <P> <TABLE ALIGN=LEFT CELLPADDING=5 BORDER=1 WIDTH=320 BGCOLOR="#99CCCC"> <TR VALIGN=MIDDLE><TD><IMG SRC="/support/gif/listen.gif" BORDER=0 VALIGN=MIDDLE> Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 26 minutes):<BR><A HREF="#" onClick="w=window.open ('/music1/bach/bach_bwv_212.html', 'newWin', 'scrollbars=yes,status=no,dependent=yes,screenX=0,screenY=0,width=350,height=350');w.opener=this;w.focus();return true"><B>Johann Sebastian Bach: Cantata BWV 212 (Bauernkantate)</B></A> </TD></TR></TABLE>
CITE THIS RECORD — BIBTEX
@online{wga-rb2d3cdab9b8fac,
author = {Krén, Emil and Marx, Daniel},
title = {Landscape with Peasants Resting by BLOEMAERT, Abraham},
organization = {{Web Gallery of Art}},
date = {2026-09-13},
url = {https://beta.wga.hu/artists/bloemaert-abraham-rcb490160a07500/landscape-with-peasants-resting-rb2d3cdab9b8fac},
urldate = {2026-09-13},
langid = {english}
}ACCESSED 2026-09-13. REPLACE THE AUTHOR FIELD WITH THE COMMENTARY AUTHOR WHERE ONE IS NAMED.
