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| Guercino Landscape with bathing women ca. 1621 oil on canvas Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam |
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| Esaias van de Velde Landscape with travellers crossing a bridge before a small dwelling 1622 oil on panel Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide |
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| Cornelis van Poelenburgh The seven children of the Winter King 1628 oil on panel Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest |
More children were born to the Winter King after these seven (above) – there were thirteen in all, and most of them lived to grow up. Princess Sophia, not yet born in this picture, became the foundress of the Hanoverian line that continues to sit on the English throne today. The Winter Queen, her mother, was Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of King James I of England. She was the older sister of Charles I and married Frederick V of the Palatinate, who became King of Bohemia shortly after their wedding. However, as Protestants they were driven out of Prague after ruling there for less than one year, victims of the raging Reformation wars of northern Europe that ruined so many 17th-century lives. Elizabeth and Frederick became permanent exiles. The children mostly made reasonably good royal or quasi-royal matches, all the same.
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| Jacob van Ruisdael Oaks at lakeside with waterlilies 1628-29 oil on canvas Gemäldegalerie, Berlin |
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| Claude Lorrain Landscape with goatherd and goats ca. 1645 oil on canvas National Gallery, London |
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| Herman van Swanevelt Italian landscape with bridge 1645 oil on canvas Dulwich Picture Gallery, London |
THE IDEAL LANDSCAPE
"There appear to be four such filters through which we can best view these pictorial worlds: the expectation sets of drama, rhetoric, Utopianism and metaphysics. Through the filters of drama and rhetoric the landscape reveals itself as a setting for human fate, for emotions and actions. Utopianism casts a different light, evoking the dream of some longed-for perfect life, while in a metaphysical light we ask ourselves whether the order visible in the pictorial space of these landscapes springs from the eternal verities of ideas or of God. The term 'ideal landscape' is employed in the literature of art history on the basis of an implicit but vague agreement as to what is actually meant. The ground common to every use of the term is some association with the landscape paintings of Annibale, Poussin and Claude. Outside this permanent trio the designation can be extended in various directions, sometimes as far forward as to include even the romantic visions of nature of nineteenth-century artists."
– Margaretha Rosshohlm Lagerlöf, from the introduction to Ideal Landscape: Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, translated from Swedish by Nancy Adler (Yale University Press, 1990)
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| Salomon van Ruysdael River landscape with ferry 1649 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi Classical landscape ca. 1650-70 oil on canvas Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide |
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| Philips Koninck Dutch Panorama - Landscape with distant view of Haarlem 1654 oil on canvas Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen |
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| Aelbert Cuyp Evening landscape with figures and sheep ca. 1655-59 oil on canvas Royal Collection, Great Britain |
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| Francisco Collantes Landscape with shepherds before 1656 oil on panel Prado, Madrid |
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| Gaspard Dughet Landscape in the Roman Campagna ca. 1670 oil on canvas Dulwich Picture Gallery, London |
"Nature in the ideal landscape is a composed nature; it does not specifically match the appearance of any particular place, even though ideas are often given recognizable Roman forms. The way the natural elements are combined reflects a choice, a statement about the world as it ought to be. Light and water emerge as the primary ingredients of nature, with trees testifying to fertility and abundance. Whether or not the artists reflected consciously upon the constituents of nature, they certainly succeeded in depicting the best conditions for human life: luxuriant trees, light and water. To this they add specific features from the Roman Campagna: the stony ground and distant mountains, lucidity rather than lushness."
– Margaretha Rosshohlm Lagerlöf, from Ideal Landscape: Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, translated from Swedish by Nancy Adler (Yale University Press, 1990)
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| Domenico Gargiulo Rebecca and Eliezer at the well before 1679 oil on canvas Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen |
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| Claude Lorrain Landscape with Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene 1681 oil on canvas Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt |