Collections: European Art: Artist Designing After Nature

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Artist Designing After Nature

Showing the working process of the seventeenth-century landscape painter, van Calraet positions two horsemen on a low rise with a panoramic view of a hill village and the surrounding flatlands. While the artist perches on a portable stool with a sketchbook propped on his knees, his companion attends to the horses and steals a look at the scene as it develops on paper. Such drawing excursions not only trained the eye and hand but permitted the artist an escape from the daily demands of the studio and an opportunity for quiet meditation. Van Calraet uses two devices to draw the viewer into the space—the engaging eye of the brown horse and the empty patch of terrain in the right foreground.


• Artist: Abraham Pietersz. van Calraet, Dutch, 1642-1722
• Medium: Oil on cradled panel
• Place Made: Netherlands
• Dates: after 1651
• Dimensions: 11 x 17 7/8 in. (27.9 x 45.4 cm) Frame: 16 3/4 x 23 1/2 in. (42.5 x 59.7 cm)
• Signature: Signed lower left: "AC"
• Collections: European Art
• Museum Location: This item is not on view
• Accession Number: 56.191
• Credit Line: Gift of Horace O. Havemeyer
• Image: Overall, 56.191_SL1.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph
Abraham Pietersz. van Calraet (Dutch, 1642-1722). Artist Designing After Nature, after 1651. Oil on cradled panel, 11 x 17 7/8 in. (27.9 x 45.4 cm) Frame: 16 3/4 x 23 1/2 in. (42.5 x 59.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Horace O. Havemeyer, 56.191 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 56.191_SL1.jpg)