INTRODUCTION

In Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), Kant comments disparagingly on the taste of the Dutch nation. “Among the types of people of our part of the world,” he writes, “in my opinion the Italians and the French are those who distinguish themselves most from all the rest by the feeling for the beautiful, but the Germans, English, and Spanish by the feeling for the sublime. Holland can be considered as the land where this finer taste becomes rather unnoticeable.” Given the worldwide renown Dutch art enjoys today, this judgment from the sage of Königsberg rings hollow to contemporary ears. In that respect, ironically enough, a current English edition of the Observations bears an image by the seventeenth-century Dutch Gouden Eeuw (Golden Age) artist Aelbert Cuyp, a painter known primarily for his portraits of cows. Whether Kant would have appreciated such barnyard pastorals, his observation on the lack of “finer taste” in Holland raises an interesting question regarding what the Dutch themselves considered sublime. Namely, with regard to the more prevalent (French, English, or German) definitions of the concept found in the present collection, how might developments in Dutch aesthetics cast a different light on the sublime in the face of those more dominant artistic or cultural developments?

This question regarding what we might call the “Dutch sublime” has only recently been taken up by scholars, and even then almost exclusively by literary historians in the Low Countries. Among these studies, the research undertaken by Christophe Madelein stands out. In his dissertation, “Juigchen in den adel der menschlijke natuur: Het verhevene in de Nederlanden (1770–1830)” (“Jubilance in the Nobility of Human Nature: The Sublime in the Low Countries [1770–1830]”), Madelein pursues philosophical debates over the concept of the sublime written in Dutch and framed within the classic contexts of Longinus, Boileau, Burke, Kant, and Schiller. According to Madelein, between 1770 and 1830 these contributions consisted, first, of translations into Dutch from German and English (of Mendelssohn, Riedel, Beattie, and Blair); second, in subsequent attempts at popularizing Kant’s philosophy in the Netherlands (by P. van Hemert, T. van Swinderen, and J. F. L. Schröder); and, finally, in specific treatments of the beautiful and the sublime (by Johannes Kinker and Willem Bilderdijk).