Shifting shores

Abstract

This article explores how Jan Saenredam and Claes Jansz Visscher, two of the Northern Netherlands’ leading printmakers in the early seventeenth century, employ varying graphic strategies to evoke the local coast’s unpredictable and rapidly changing environment. It focuses on two ambitious and relatively large-scale prints with widespread distribution: Saenredam’s 1602 engraving Beached whale near Beverwijk and Visscher’s etching of about 1615 View of Egmond aan Zee. Lively with activity and dense with figures, allegory, text, and civic insignia, the two images integrate cartographic convention, natural history illustration, and landscape imagery. Kase argues that the artists evoke the often imperceptible forces that animate and change the outermost edges of landscape, exhibiting environmental awareness through their concern for the shared facture of the landscape and the resultant prints. Their images, therefore, could act as a proxy through which seventeenth-century Netherlanders engaged with the instability of their coastal environs.