This text spans 500 years of landscape painting, from the atmospheric landscapes of Brueghel to the dramatic works of Jacob Ruisdael. The book illustrates the progression of landscape painting from colourful, light infused Impressionist imagery to the emotive works of Expressionism.

-2019 commemorates the 450 anniversary of the death of Pieter Bruegel the Elder -The city of Dilbeek celebrates this with an open-air exhibition with installations by 15 international artists and designers -The exhibition is a time warp setting Bruegel against a 21st century backdrop 2019 commemorates the 450 anniversary of the death of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The city of Dilbeek celebrates this with an open-air exhibition with installations by several international artists and designers. The exhibition is a time warp and sets Bruegel against a 21st century backdrop. We follow the gaze of the painter when he was composing his impressive landscape paintings. The chapel of Sint-Anna-Pede and the watermill of Sint-Gertrudis-Pede, two monuments painted by Bruegel, are the starting and ending point for a walk along fifteen installations. Fifteen artists, designers and architects designed a trail through the landscape that inspired Bruegel five centuries ago. They construct pavilions, make structures, design imaginative landscapes and tell stories that interact with places, play with the perception of the space, create new unexpected environments, work disorienting or help to focus attention. Featuring artworks by Rotor, Filip Dujardin, Koen van den Broek, Erik Dhont, KGDVS & Bas Pincen, Bas Smets, Lois Weinberger, Landinzicht, Guillaume Bijl, Gijs Van Vaerenbergh, Futurefarmers, Georges Rousse and Josse De Pauw. Curator of 'De Blik van Bruegel' is Stefan Devoldere, professor and dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Art at Hasselt University. Text in English and Dutch.

In this first comprehensive full length study in English on the art of Jan Brueghel the Elder, Leopoldine Prosperetti discloses the nature of the philosophical culture of Antwerp at the time, show its importance in the lives of cultivated citizens, and reveals the patterns of thought and visual stratagems by which his landscapes underwrite the pursuit of wisdom. The book presents a new model for the interpretation of a range of visual genres, including various types of landscape, that were popular in the Antwerp picture trade.

Landscapes form a central core of the princely picture gallery, covering the entire span of the collection from the late 14th to the mid-19th century. If the landscape at first appears not as the actual theme of the work, but only a view, a background staffage, it subsequently acquires increasing weight as a genre in its own right, and enjoys its first golden age in the 17th century, most of all among the Flemish and Dutch painters. These same artists have been represented by incomparable major works in the Princely Collections ? the introduction to the 1948 Lucerne catalogue observes that ?the eyes of the princely collectors have always been aimed at Belgium and Holland both in the past and in the present day. The exhibition covers the entire spectrum of landscape painting, through to recently acquired examples of urban landscapes, shown here for the first time. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries Arcadian landscapes were produced, ideal landscapes that were supposed to lead the visitor away to an imagined ancient world that had never existed in that form; a generation later, painters such as Ferdinand Georg Waldm?ller sought the light of the south and during the time of Biedermeier discovered plein-air painting, which would lead without a break to Impressionism. This period in particular could not be better covered than by the material of the Princely Collections; all the great names of the day are represented here by significant major works.

The variations of pleasure and their expression in Dutch rustic landscapes of the seventeenth century are recurring themes in Walter S. Gibson's engaging new book. Gibson focuses on Haarlem between 1600 and 1635, in his interpretation of Dutch landscapes and emphasizes prints, the medium in which the rustic view was first made available to the general art-buying public. Gibson begins by looking at the origins of the rustic landscape in the sixteenth-century Flanders and its later reformation by Dutch artists, a legacy very much alive today. He next offers a critical review of "scriptural reading," a popular mode of interpreting the Dutch rustic landscape that incorporates Calvinist-influenced moral allegories. Gibson then explores traditional ideas concerning recreation and suggests that the pleasure of rural landscapes, not preaching, constituted their chief appeal for seventeenth-century urban viewers. Using Visscher's Plaisante Plaetsen ("Pleasant Places") as a point of departure, Gibson examines the ways that townspeople, both the day-trippers and owners of country houses, experienced the Dutch countryside. He also discusses the role of staffage and suggests how the representations of peasants might have conditioned the responses of contemporary viewers to rural images. Finally, Gibson considers how scenes of the dilapidated farm buildings, dead trees, and other evidence of material decay may reflect traditional ideas rustic life as imagined by a townsperson. Or how they may represent another way for the artist to engage his urban audience: far removed from the idealized landscapes of a Giorgione, the rustic landscape of a Ruisdael conveys a countryside that was beginning to disappear under the relentless pressures of urbanization. Gibson's multilayered exploration of the rustic landscape enhances our understanding of the Golden Age in Dutch art. His richly illustrated book recalls a countryside now largely gone; at the same time, his evocative language gracefully articulates the role of the Dutch rustic landscape in the history of landscape painting.