My dissertation examines 16th- and 17th-century Dutch landscape and cityscape images that address the topic of land reclamation or feature construction, engineering, and proto-industrial motifs. Through examination of patent drawings, manuscript and printed maps, as well as associated chorographic texts, I argue that Dutch artists, such as Jan van Goyen (1596–1656), Frans Post (1612–1680), Jacob van Ruisdael (c. 1628/1629–1682), and Gerrit Adriaensz. Berckheyde (1638–1698), interacted with the emerging political economy of projects—a planning discourse related to natural philosophy—which had gained conceptual authority through the growing prestige of the building trades and practical forms of knowledge in the early modern period. In brief, the study of nature became allied with a new awareness of the built environment, a development that accrued novel cultural meaning not just in the Dutch Republic, but also widely across Europe.

To this last point, I had the opportunity to study a rare album of French, Italian, and Dutch technical drawings during my fellowship year, which I spent in Amsterdam. While French and Italian drawings of engineering subjects and their printed cognates in “Theaters of Machines” are well-documented, Dutch drawings of the same, with Dutch-language inscriptions, are vanishingly rare. The collation of these sheets implies the inherent cosmopolitanism of such technical imagery, as the unknown, probably Dutch, compiler used the format of the album to invite consideration of hallmark Dutch technologies, such as the drainage mill, in relation to innovative practices from elsewhere in Europe. The organization of the album also amounts to a corrective of existing printed architectural formats in the Low Countries, as the drawings are bound together with a 1619 edition of Hans Vredeman de Vries’s Architectura, a “Column Book” that omitted the wide-ranging engineering topics addressed in its source material, Vitruvius’s De architectura. While water-lifting technology was a preoccupation of Book X in Vitruvius’s treatise, the album honors yet modernizes this theme by introducing a contemporary Dutch variant on this classical principle. In this way, the album reinforced my findings in the early modern patent archive, which similarly register the evolving status of tradespeople engaged in “real-world” practices.

The past year also afforded new opportunities to share my research with the scholarly community. As part of a College Art Association panel sponsored by the Historians of Netherlandish Art, I presented a talk titled “Jan van Goyen’s Haarlemmermeer.” A painting of 1646 representing the large lake in the center of Holland, preserved in New York, was the centerpiece of the discussion. I demonstrated through historical land surveys that Van Goyen likely intended to depict the region before flooding had altered the shoreline. Not only an exercise in historical “mapping,” the painting was produced after a period of intensive interest in reclaiming the lake, most famously by the Dutch millwright Jan Adriaansz. Leegwater (1575–1650). Within this context—and in view of the wider significance of the “project” as a critical viewpoint on the world—I argued that Van Goyen engaged in a building modality through his visual restoration of the landscape as a site of productivity.

Some decades later, the English diplomat William Temple (1628–1699) would summarize many of the themes I have briefly addressed here. In his Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands of 1673, he noted that “Low Interest, and Dearness of Land, are Effects of the Multitude of People, and cause so much money to lie ready for all Projects, by which Gain may be expected; as the cutting of Canals, making Bridges and Causeys, levelling Downs, and draining Marshes, besides all new Essays at foreign Trade, which are proposed with any Probability of Advantage” (italics mine). Temple was just one of many commentators who used the Dutch example to describe the consequential relationship of building practice, its local environment, and economic gain that constitute the critical vocabulary of the “project.” My dissertation has correspondingly attempted to demonstrate how Dutch landscape and cityscape imagery actively participated in its conceptual development.

University of California, Santa Barbara
Robert H. and Clarice Smith Fellow, 2025–2026

Alec Aldrich is the new Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellow at the Harvard Art Museums, where he will be working with the institution’s notable holdings of 16th- and 17th-century Dutch drawings over the course of his two-year appointment. He also has an article forthcoming in a special issue of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, devoted to the topic of drawing, in which he discusses the manuscript land reclamation proposals of Jan Adriaansz. Leegwater.