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