The authors, Rogelio Pérez Moreira and María Teresa Barral Silva, frame their argument around a simple observation: soil is usually shown only at its surface, and rarely in profile, the three-dimensional cross-section that soil scientists study. A soil profile only becomes visible in a painting when the ground is cut open, along a road cutting, a slope or an escarpment. Yet even then, the internal differentiation of horizons would rarely be observable without deliberate excavation, something inconceivable in eras long before scientific soil study. The striking exception, they find, is that certain paintings show textures, colors and chromatic sequences that correspond to real soil features identifiable today, including dark surface horizons and even the bleached eluvial and reddish illuvial layers of podzols.

The precursors are revealing. Medieval and Renaissance artists showed soil mainly as surface, as in the plowed fields of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry from 1413 to 1416 or Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s The Fall of Icarus from around 1558 to 1560. Where the ground was opened, as in works by Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling, Hieronymus Bosch or Giorgione, the exposed earth often carried symbolic weight, serving as an allegory of resurrection or an excuse to display roots with their own emblematic meaning. Occasionally a real profile emerges, as in Giovanni Agostino da Lodi’s Pan and Syrinx of around 1510, where a darkened A horizon shows above a talus, or in the deep reddish-brown cuttings of 17th-century Flemish painter Lodewijk de Vadder. But these remain exceptions against a convention in which soil was scenery, not subject.

The first true flowering came with the birth of landscape painting itself. Art historians generally agree that landscape became an autonomous genre at the start of the 17th century in the Nordic countries, and definitively in Holland. The context was revolutionary: the Seven United Provinces had declared independence from Spain in 1579, Protestantism replaced Catholicism, and a powerful commercial bourgeoisie transformed the art market. With courtly and ecclesiastical patronage gone, and the Reformed Church proscribing religious imagery, the new merchant class collected small-format paintings of the world around them. By mid-century, landscapes made up nearly 40 percent of Dutch artistic production, bought by all classes of society, driven by civic pride in a free country, nostalgia for a rural past among an increasingly urban population, and a special relationship with land reclaimed from wetlands around Haarlem and Amsterdam.

Dutch painters rarely finished canvases outdoors, but they went into the field to sketch from nature, and those excursions let them perceive details and subtleties that studio-bound traditions had never registered. The result was a naturalism built on thorough observation of specifics, even if the final works were believable reconstructions rather than literal transcriptions. Crucially for soil scientists, much of the Netherlands sits on drifting sand deposits, whose buried paleosols commonly show podzolic characteristics, with a pale leached E horizon above a dark spodic B horizon. A whole school of painters specialized in dune landscapes: Esaias van de Velde, Jan van Goyen, Pieter de Molijn and Salomon van Ruysdael established a tonal phase of warm grays and earth tones, later monumentalized by Jacob van Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema and Philips Wouwerman.

The profiles in these paintings grow steadily more eloquent. Aelbert Cuyp’s river scenes and wooded landscapes show the dark surface horizon clearly. Salomon van Ruysdael’s Landscape with Sandy Road of 1628 presents an upper horizon thick with roots. But the standout is Jan Wijnants of Haarlem, who devoted his entire career to dune paintings. After moving permanently to Amsterdam in December 1660, his canvases began showing soil details that the authors describe as exceptional for their time and undoubtedly the result of prior observation. In works such as The Dunes near Haarlem of 1667, the dark A horizon sits above the dune substrate, and in several paintings the pale eluvial E horizon and the underlying illuvial spodic B horizon of a podzol can be distinguished, a sequence any soil scientist would recognize today.

The second flowering came two centuries later, in the 19th century, when industrial prosperity empowered a new bourgeoisie and artists, freed from painting the grandeur of monarchs, developed their individuality and absorbed the excitement of the natural sciences. The Dutch masters themselves became the models: Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable studied Ruisdael, Hobbema and Wijnants with devoted admiration, and the Dutch contribution to European landscape was ultimately its naturalism. Plein air painting, rare and technically difficult before the invention of paint tubes and portable easels at mid-century, became a genuine practice. Romanticism had elevated landscape to academic respectability; Realism then demanded that nature be reproduced truthfully, as John Ruskin urged in Modern Painters, without rejecting, choosing or despising anything. Natural elements were no longer decorative props but singular entities reproduced according to their own reality.

Three schools carried this new naturalism, and all three left soil records. In England, Constable, painting outdoors from 1810 onward, showed the soil profile clearly in works such as Dedham Vale of 1802 and Dell at Helmingham Park from the mid-1820s, where the surface horizon and other features are distinguishable. In France, the creation of the Grand Prix de Rome for historical landscape in 1817 sent candidates into the Forest of Fontainebleau for the dreaded tree test, seeding the Barbizon School. Early figures Georges Michel and Làzare Bruandet showed profiles in Fontainebleau scenes, and Jacques-Raymond Brascassat, who studied in Italy after winning second prize in 1825, made the soil profile evident in Rochers en forêt of 1828, while Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s Carrière de Chaise-Marie à Fontainebleau of 1831 offers a deliberately unpicturesque fragment of nature that appears drawn directly from life, soil included. In the Netherlands, the Hague School’s Willem Roelofs, who visited Fontainebleau three times, rendered soil with meticulous realism, whether as the surface of an old riverbed or in his detailed Forest of Fontainebleau.

The authors’ conclusion is that the most faithful pictorial representations of soil in Western art coincide precisely with the two periods when naturalistic landscape painting flourished, the 17th and 19th centuries, because exceptional social and cultural circumstances favored open-air observation. When those circumstances vanished, so did the soil. The 18th century’s academic criteria and the late 19th century’s turn toward Impressionism, Symbolism and eventually abstraction replaced faithful description with conceptual and subjective codes, and the recognizable soil profile disappeared from painting. Under modern aesthetics, external reality gave way to visions born from the artist’s spirit, and soil returned to being scenery, or in contemporary Land Art and Eco Art, a physical medium rather than an image.

Why does this matter beyond art history? The researchers argue that paintings can serve as a documentary source and cultural indicator, testifying to how soil was perceived in periods long before pedology, a science only about 150 years old with the Russian scientist Vasily Dokuchaev as its founding reference. Artistic images of soil, they suggest, can also help soil scientists communicate with a broader public, attracting attention beyond the restricted audience of specialists and opening an interdisciplinary dialogue between science and the humanities. In an era when soil degradation and security are urgent global concerns, the idea that a 17th-century dune painting can double as a pedological document, and that Dutch Golden Age canvases once helped a young republic celebrate its land, gives one of humanity’s most overlooked resources an unexpectedly vivid cultural afterlife.

Subject of Research: The representation of soil and soil profiles in naturalistic landscape painting of the 17th and 19th centuries

Article Title: Soil in Art. Its Representation in Naturalistic Painting of the 17th and 19th Centuries

Article References: Pérez Moreira, R., & Barral Silva, M. T. (2025). Soil in Art. Its Representation in Naturalistic Painting of the 17th and 19th Centuries. Spanish Journal of Soil Science, 15, Article 14834. https://doi.org/10.3389/sjss.2025.14834

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/sjss.2025.14834

Keywords: soil science, pedology, art history, landscape painting, Dutch Golden Age, Barbizon School, Hague School, John Constable, Jan Wijnants, soil horizons, podzol, plein air painting

The research team, led by Aman Dhindsa of the University of Waterloo together with colleagues at Memorial University of Newfoundland, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: can farmers growing crops on freshly cleared boreal soil skip the years of near-barren production that normally follow land conversion? Converting forest to farmland disturbs natural soil horizon development and strips away the organic-rich surface layers, leaving behind mineral soil with poor nutrient retention, low cation exchange capacity, and concentrations of soluble aluminum and iron that suppress root growth and lock up phosphorus. The team hypothesized that pairing nutrient sources with organic matter inputs and liming agents would rapidly relieve these constraints.

To test this, the researchers established a randomized complete block design with 36 treatment combinations replicated across three blocks. Three nutrient sources were compared: a conventional mineral fertilizer blend of 20:10:5 N:P:K supplemented with potash, herring fish meal as a regionally relevant organic alternative, and an unfertilized control. These were crossed with four organic matter and liming treatments: hardwood biochar applied at 20.8 tonnes of carbon per hectare, sphagnum peat at 25.1 tonnes of carbon per hectare, peat combined with limestone at 5,400 kilograms per hectare, and no amendment. Each combination was grown under three cropping systems: monocrop oat, monocrop pea, and an oat-pea intercrop seeded in a 60:40 ratio.

The chemistry behind the two winning amendments tells much of the story. Hardwood biochar, produced by pyrolysis of biomass, carries alkaline ash fractions along with carboxylic, hydroxyl, and phenolic surface functional groups that neutralize acidity and adsorb cations. The biochar used in the trial had a measured calcium carbonate equivalence of 16.1 percent, contributing roughly 3,458 kilograms of CaCO3 equivalent per hectare. The peat-plus-limestone treatment delivered even more neutralizing power, about 4,806 kilograms of CaCO3 equivalent per hectare, dissolving to release calcium and magnesium that displace hydrogen and aluminum ions from exchange sites. Both amendments pushed soil pH from deeply acidic starting values toward the 5.9 to 6.4 range, while plots receiving peat alone or nothing at all languished between 5.27 and 5.63.

Those pH shifts cascaded through the entire soil-plant system. Biochar-amended and peat-with-limestone plots recorded the highest cation exchange capacity, the largest extractable potassium, calcium, and magnesium concentrations, and, critically, the greatest aboveground biomass, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium uptake in all three cropping systems, with differences statistically significant at p < 0.05. In oat plots, the best-performing biochar and fish meal combination out-yielded the worst unamended control treatment by more than fivefold. Biochar treatments alone pushed extractable soil potassium to 67.38 milligrams per kilogram in pea plots, while the intercrop system recorded the highest absolute potassium uptake of any cropping arrangement.

Not every expected response materialized. Despite raising pH, neither liming amendment produced a measurable increase in extractable soil phosphorus, a result the authors attribute to the overwhelming dominance of aluminum in these soils. Phosphorus sorption capacity in Podzols is tightly linked to Mehlich-3 extractable aluminum, which was by far the most abundant mineral measured at the site, so phosphate fixation persisted even as acidity eased. Soil organic matter content, meanwhile, remained stubbornly low at 1.01 to 1.87 percent across all plots after one season, confirming that a single growing season is far too short for microbial turnover and humification to build meaningful carbon stocks, even with massive carbon-rich inputs.

The nutrient source comparison delivered a surprise with practical consequences for remote northern farms. Herring fish meal, a dried fisheries byproduct with a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of roughly 3.9, matched or nominally exceeded mineral fertilizer across most yield and uptake measurements, though the authors caution that statistical separation was limited. The explanation lies in mineralization dynamics: fish meal’s low C:N ratio supports rapid microbial conversion of organic nitrogen into plant-available mineral forms within a single season, whereas the ammonium and nitrate in mineral fertilizer are prone to leaching from coarse, low-CEC sandy soil before roots can capture them. Fish meal may also have fed the soil’s starved microbial community with additional carbon, improving nutrient cycling beyond nitrogen alone.

Nutrient use efficiency indices reinforced the amendment story. Nitrogen and phosphorus agronomic efficiencies and partial factor productivity consistently formed their top statistical groupings under biochar or peat with limestone, regardless of nutrient source. Recovery efficiency of nitrogen was highest under fish meal in every cropping system, reaching 1.20 kilograms of nitrogen taken up per kilogram applied in oat plots with peat and lime. Potassium recovery efficiency under biochar with fish meal ranged from 12.2 in pea to a striking 28.1 in the intercrop, reflecting biochar’s dual role as both a potassium source through its residual ash and a retention medium that keeps monovalent cations from being displaced by hydrogen and aluminum ions on exchange sites.

One agronomic detail stands out for anyone planning northern legume production: pea crops underperformed in nitrogen use efficiency relative to oat and the intercrop, likely because rhizobial nodulation is pH-sensitive and many plots remained below the optimal range for the nitrogen-fixing symbiosis, particularly where peat alone or no amendment was applied. This underscores that liming is not merely a yield booster but a prerequisite for the biological nitrogen fixation that makes legume intercrops attractive in low-input northern systems. The intercrop’s exceptional potassium uptake, combined with its more moderate yield swings between best and worst treatments, suggests mixed cropping adds resilience on newly converted land.

The authors are careful to frame their results as a first-season, single-site demonstration of chemical alleviation rather than long-term soil transformation, and they flag real-world caveats. The hardwood biochar was trucked in from Quebec, and at 20.8 tonnes of carbon per hectare its cost likely exceeds that of conventional limestone or locally harvested peat, though farmers in the Happy Valley–Goose Bay region are now exploring low-cost trench-pyrolysis methods to produce biochar locally. Peat with limestone matched biochar’s performance across many combinations while being cheaper and more available, but peat extraction is environmentally unsustainable over the long term because peatlands regenerate slowly and store regional carbon. What the trial proves, unambiguously, is that the acute fertility crisis of year one on converted boreal Podzol is solvable: with biochar or peat and lime, oat yields above five tonnes per hectare and pea yields above three tonnes per hectare became possible before any long-term organic matter accumulation had even begun. Multi-year, multi-site trials will now be needed to determine whether these rapid chemical gains persist and compound into durable northern farmland.

Subject of Research: Soil amendment effects on nutrient availability and forage crop uptake in recently converted boreal Podzolic soil

Article Title: Amendment-driven changes in nutrient availability and forage uptake in a recently converted boreal soil

Article References: Dhindsa, A., Unc, A., Kedir, A. J., & Oelbermann, M. (2026). Amendment-driven changes in nutrient availability and forage uptake in a recently converted boreal soil. Discover Soil, 3(1), Article 179. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44378-026-00318-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44378-026-00318-6

Keywords: biochar, Podzol, boreal agriculture, soil pH, liming, peat, fish meal, nutrient use efficiency, forage crops, oat-pea intercrop, Labrador, soil fertility