Nature: Threat and Treasure
The collection presented by Torres Nieto Fine Arts under the title Nature: Threat and Treasure brings together a selection of Dutch and Flemish paintings from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in which nature takes centre stage. These works continue to captivate audiences today, presenting nature as a richly nuanced motif in still lifes, portraits, and as the main subject of landscapes. At once vibrant and ambivalent — at times menacing, at times nurturing — nature emerges both as a reflection of human vulnerability and stage upon which the human story unfolds.
From Antwerp to the North: The Netherlands becoming a World Power
The artistic engagement with nature unfolds against the backdrop of profound social and political change. Following the fall of Antwerp in 1585, the Northern Netherlands quickly rose to international prominence, ushering in the period later celebrated as the Dutch Golden Age. Politically, the region gradually gained independence: the Twelve Years’ Truce of 1609 and the Peace of Münster in 1648 formally recognized the Republic as a sovereign state. The founding of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1602 strengthened global trade, and Dutch ships came to dominate the seas. Commerce and the expansion of the merchant fleet brought immense wealth, though not without the human costs of colonial expansion, including the trade in enslaved people. At the same time, a prosperous burgher elite emerged, actively supporting the advancement of science and the arts.
Specialisation in genre painting
The economic boom of the seventeenth century transformed the art market. Artists were no longer primarily dependent on commissions from the Church or royal patrons; instead, the prosperous Protestant burgher elite became their primary audience. This shift profoundly influenced artistic practice and choice of subject matter. Painters increasingly focused on specific genres — history paintings, landscapes, portraits, genre scenes, and still lifes — and selected their own themes for their works of art, which they then marketed themselves or through art dealers. The result was a rich diversity of subjects and a new creative freedom that reflected the taste and ambitions of the time.
Nature: drawn from Nature or from the Mind?
Landscape painting in the Dutch Republic developed into an autonomous genre centred on the visible world. Artists such as Salomon Rombouts and Jan Looten ventured into the countryside to observe and capture the landscape up close. The resulting drawings served as the foundation for full-fledged compositions later created in the studio. This practice was shaped in part by early seventeenth-century theoretical writings, most notably those of the Haarlem art theorist Karel van Mander. In his Schilder-boeck (1604), Van Mander advocated working outdoors and producing sketches on site, both to study nature closely and to refine artistic skills. Similar advice was offered later in the century. In his Inleydinge tot de Al-ghemeene Tecken-Konst (1668), Willem Goeree encouraged artists to make regular excursions, preferably into varied landscapes. Samuel van Hoogstraten went further still: in his Inleyding tot de Hooge School der Schilderkonst (1678), he argued that observations from nature should be so thoroughly internalised that the artist could work convincingly from memory alone.
This method — combining recorded observation with artistic interpretation — was widely adopted by landscape painters such as Jacob van Ruisdael, Nicolaes Berchem, and Meindert Hobbema. Their paintings present not only recognisable topography, but also reflect a seventeenth-century perception of nature as a space imbued with moral didactic qualities: a source of tranquillity and beauty, yet also of power and latent threat, as can be observed in Salomon Rombouts’s Dune Landscape.
Spectacles of Nature
Although painters of this era never painted outdoors, they still attempted to create a convincing representation of their surroundings by going into nature and making sketches from life. Changing light, varying weather conditions, and the cycle of the seasons became subjects in their own right, separate from historical, religious or mythological narrative, of which An Arcadian Landscape with Nymphs by Anthonie Croos is a notable example. In this sense, landscape painting developed into an independent genre entirely dedicated to the spectacle of nature itself.
Within the context of early modern landscape theory, this understanding of nature provided artists with a framework for representing the world as a domain in which human presence is provisional and vulnerable. Painters such as Allart van Everdingen gave visual form to these ideas by depicting untamed terrains, dramatic weather conditions, and rugged northern landscapes that resisted cultivation or human control. The diminished scale of the figures within these compositions underscores the disproportion between human endeavour and the material forces of the natural world, connecting Dutch landscape painting to contemporary philosophical reflections on the limits of human agency and the awe-inspiring power of nature.
Classical notions of the natural world played a formative role in the intellectual background of seventeenth-century landscape painting. In De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) composed in the mid-first century BCE, the Roman poet Lucretius articulated a vision in which the material world is governed by autonomous, often violent forces — storms, floods, and volcanic eruptions — that operate independently of human intention or moral order. Nature, in this view, is neither benevolent nor hostile, but immense, dynamic, and fundamentally indifferent to human existence.
Across these works, nature emerges as a force that is both formidable and sustaining, defining human existence in all its vulnerability and dependence. In some paintings, nature manifests itself with immediate power: storms, turbulent seas, and extreme weather phenomena — most vividly rendered in seascapes such as the Ship in Heavy See of Flemish origin — show the fragility and transience of human life in the face of the elements. In other landscape types, such as representations of the seasons, the emphasis shifts towards humanity’s reliance on nature as a source of sustenance and survival. Wood gatherers, see Jan Looten, hunters with their spoils — exemplified by Johannes Leemans Hunting Still Life with Birds and Herman van der Mijn’s family portrait Gift of the Hunter — populate those landscapes shaped by labour’s toil for livelihood, where dependence on and cultivation of the natural world are inextricably linked. This relationship is also clearly visible in the industrious riverscapes of Adriaen van Stalbemt and Jacobus Storck.
Nature versus Man
Even when landscape or, in the case of still lifes, natural motifs dominate, human presence and intervention are rarely absent, as evidenced by Jan van Kessel the Elder’s Fish and Shelves on the Seashore. Figures function as subtle indicators of scale, as is the case in both Jan Looten’s Woodcutters and Abraham Hondius’s Hilly Landscape, emphasising the vastness and latent power of the environment, while simultaneously reinforcing the symbolic meaning of the scene. Whether as a traveller, as seen in the small-scale View into the Valley in the style of Saftleven, a labourer, hunter, or survivor, the human figure is invariably defined by its relationship to nature — an environment that sustains life and sometimes threatens to overwhelm it.
These developments cannot be separated from the tradition from which the pictorial genre emerged. Rooted in the long continuity of religious visual culture in the Low Countries, the landscape remained more than a mere realistic representation for many contemporaries. Within a seventeenth-century worldview based on analogy, nature — both experienced and depicted — was understood as a bearer of divine or cosmic meaning. Landscapes could thus reveal, overtly or subtly, traces of God’s creation and purpose for men.
Besides their aesthetic value, some of these works also possess a distinct natural history dimension. Carefully observed flora and fauna appear in landscapes already altered by human activity. One such painting by Jan Lagoor depicts graceful birds, some of which are now extinct. Such images thus transcend their artistic function, and serve as visual testimonies to a natural world that has been irreversibly transformed — or lost beyond recall.
Interest in these genres was widespread in the seventeenth century, extending far beyond the borders of the Dutch Republic. Not only the affluent upper class of burghers, but also the international aristocracy avidly collected landscapes and still lifes of Dutch and Flemish origin. For this elite, such paintings fit seamlessly into the collecting culture of the period, in which works of art were displayed alongside Naturalia — collections of exotic shells, minerals, and curiosities such as preserved pufferfish. Art and natural history thus went hand in hand and mutually reinforced each other within the intimate setting of the cabinet.
Beyond the immediately visible and sensory, multiple layers of meaning can thus be present, ranging from historical and moral allusions to allegorical and religious connotations. Seventeenth-century landscape and still life painting exist at the intersection of observation and contemplation, between empirical reality and spiritual imagination. Yet, there is no single universally accepted interpretation, and each work must ultimately be judged on its own merits.
Let yourself be carried away on this visual journey through the many facets of nature — menacing and lush, wild and cultivated — under the inspiring guidance of twelve exceptional Old Masters, who each in their own way have captured the complex relationship between humanity and the natural world, revealing a world worthy of admiration, study and contemplation.
A catalog accompanying the exhibition of paintings has been released (ISBN 978-3-00-085862-8)