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Humanities and Social Sciences Library > Collections & Reading Rooms > Print Collection     Hessel Gerrits (Dutch, 1581-1632) Print series of the “Four Seasons,” combining allegorical figures with closely observed objects from nature and naturalistic landscape views, had proliferated in late 16th-century Antwerp. In this series designed by David Vinckboons, one of many artists who fled Flanders for Holland during the Dutch Revolt, the allegorical model of the seasons has been transformed by the growing Dutch landscape tradition. Four venerable Dutch castles are placed within idealized, but believable settings, where peasants and aristocrats work and play. The depiction of local castles celebrated the antiquity of the Dutch, surely pleasing the owners of the castles (Nijenrode Castle’s inhabitants may be among the figures strolling in the gardens in Spring), and probably also validated the cultural and economic position Holland was beginning to assume alongside the leading royal families of early seventeenth-century Europe. Hessel Gerrits, an Amsterdam mathematician and engraver of maps and topographic views, ably captures the lyrical spirit of Vinckboons’s compositions. Photographic Services & Permissions Back
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