Beyond the horizon: Vastness in landscapes in the SLAM collection

Vastness appears in several works featured in the SLAM collection, and for good reason: The tension between what’s visible and incomprehensible creates a quiet, emotional intensity in prints, drawings, and paintings. These landscapes often focused exclusively on the terrain, but sometimes, artists chose to include figures. Several artists across centuries, including Rembrandt van Rijn, Vincent van Gogh, and Alice Rahon explored the theme of vastness, creating landscapes that depicted sprawling regions while also reflecting parts of their personal journeys.

For example, 17th-century Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn explored vastness in his country through innovative printmaking. Visitors can see his technique in The Windmill, a print available for viewing in SLAM’s online collection, or requested for in-person viewing through the Museum’s Study Room for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. Rembrandt created landscape etchings like this one when he wandered around the marshes near Amsterdam in search of inspiration. He knew how windmills worked because his father owned one on the outskirts of his hometown of Leiden.

Rembrandt’s subject in this print from 1641 is the Little Stink Mill, a windmill in Amsterdam that tanned leather with foul-smelling cod liver oil. In this work, he shows the windmill on a raised platform next to a dilapidated cottage surrounded by a fence. A figure carrying a sack enters the windmill at right, while another figure labors under the platform. The scene is set against a flat, empty landscape with a low horizon, where two distant figures are visible. Rembrandt likely sketched the mill and surrounding landscape on-site and then etched it on the plate in his studio.

Two centuries later, another Dutch artist turned to works on paper to explore vastness, carrying forward the connection between line, landscape, and location. Vincent van Gogh depicts a stark landscape in Belgium on both sides of a sheet of paper in Landscape with Pollard Willows (verso: Figure in a Landscape), which can be viewed in the Museum’s online collection or requested for in-person viewing in the Study Room. Each drawing shows a figure walking through the landscape; the larger figure moves through the outskirts of an industrial town, while the smaller figure walks through fields.

These two works from around 1880 show Van Gogh’s life during this period and illustrate his path to becoming an artist. Between 1878 and 1880, Van Gogh lived in a coal mining region of Borinage in Belgium, where he traveled to realize his dream of becoming a Protestant preacher. The delicate pen-and-ink hatch marks in Landscape with Pollard Willows reflect Van Gogh’s developing technique, one that he applied later while growing as an artist and capturing landscapes abroad.

Several years later, after moving to France to advance his artistic career, Van Gogh created the landscape Factories at Clichy, which is on view in SLAM’s online collection. During the time he made this painting, Van Gogh lived with his brother Theo in Paris and traveled almost daily to the suburbs to paint. Van Gogh’s landscape shows factories billowing smoke into the air in the industrial suburb of Clichy, northwest of Paris. Three horizontal bands define the scene—fields, factories, and the sky—with two tiny figures visible in the field. The ordered brushwork in this painting builds on Van Gogh’s technique from earlier years and reflects his awareness of the Pointillist experiments of French artist Georges Seurat, demonstrating his progression as an artist.

A century later, French artist Alice Rahon also depicted vastness in landscapes after leaving her home country. In the 1930s, Rahon became active with Surrealism in Paris and published several volumes of poetry. She later traveled through the Pacific Northwest before continuing to Mexico in 1939 after the outbreak of World War II.

What began as a brief exile lasted decades. Rahon joined a community of avant-garde artists in Mexico, where she began to make paintings and sculptures. Over the next 40 years, Rahon often drew inspiration from Mexican landscapes for her paintings, as viewers can see in Sandstorm.

In Sandstorm, which is on view in Mae M. Whitaker Gallery 212, Rahon shows a large, hot sun hanging low through a storm over Mesoamerican pyramids, and a herd of livestock. “Sandstorm coincides with my discovery of the Mexican landscape—I made a series of landscapes where I tried to give that impression of infinite space, and dramatic scale where humans are too small to be visible,” Rahon said in a letter in 1958.

Although Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Rahon’s works span centuries and locations, they’re united in their portrayal of vastness as an overwhelming force. Humans—if they can be seen at all—are specks on paper or canvas, almost swallowed by their surroundings, suggesting the precariousness of human existence in a vast world.