Śladami siedemnastowiecznych pejzażystów holenderskich (i Fromentina)

The article analyzes the reception of the seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting in the Polish postwar literature. The main thesis is that the Polish writers (which frequently were also the painters – e.g. Józef Pankiewicz, Tadeusz Makowski, Jan Cybis, Józef Czapski) look at Jacob van Ruisdael’s or Paulus Potter’s paintings through the prism of the interpretation proposed by Eugène Fromentin in his famous The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland. A different vision of the “realistic” Dutch landscape painting is presented by Zbigniew Herbert, who was an admirer of Jan van Goyen’s monochromatic style. The Polish writer tried to revise the Fromentin’s nineteenth-century conception of Dutch art considered as an exact “portrait of Holland”.