Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and Landscape Representation

This chapter identifies a correspondence between Dutch amateur art and the place of landscape in Rembrandt’s artistic production, and in doing so illuminates the link between gift culture and the withholding of certain types of artworks from the domain of the marketplace. Dutch amateurs favored landscapes drawn from nature as a pastime, thus enacting interrelated ideals of art and leisure that also governed the status of landscape in contemporary art theory. This aestheticized social construct of sketching nature as a leisure activity also shaped the landscape art of prominent history painters, including Rembrandt, whose landscape drawings share close affinities with amateur landscapes. Rembrandt’s sketching excursions in Amsterdam’s suburban countryside, like those of Dutch amateurs, were not purely a commercial undertaking.