Travellers’ Tales of Arcadia
Around 1640 as the Dutch, sailing the world’s oceans, developed a sense of the poetic land of Arcadia where Virgil pointed to the contrast between the innocent lives and loves of shepherds and shepherdesses and the ruin brought by courtly ambition and urban rivalries, Berchem turned his attention to the same theme. The first generation of Dutch landscape painters had already discovered how to create a tonally coherent space by devising simple, natural-looking diagonal compositions. But the ethereal atmosphere of these fluid, swiftly painted riverbanks and clearings was only achieved at the cost of clear colours, sunlight and any real sense of physical presence.