The Art of Dutch Wetlands: Reclamation and Reconciliation

Sarah Mallory, Annette and Oscar de la Renta Assistant Curator of Drawings and Prints, Morgan Library & Museum

Wetlands, be it marshes, bogs, or sodden shoals, are quintessential features of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape drawings, prints, paintings, and decorative arts. Yet, the cultural significance of these ecosystems, which readily appear in works by celebrated artists including Rembrandt and Vermeer, is often–quite literally–overlooked by art historians. This talk will bring wetlands back into our field of vision. We will examine a wide array of artworks and their makers to reveal the fundamental importance of wetlands to Dutch art. We will also consider how these works, made more than four centuries ago, reflect colonial ideologies that continue to shape the world in which we live.

Biography:

Sarah W. Mallory is the Annette and Oscar de la Renta assistant curator of drawings and prints at The Morgan Library & Museum. She is currently organizing the forthcoming exhibition, ‘Rembrandt’s Lions: Art and Exile in the Dutch Republic’ (October 23, 2026 – January 31, 2027). She previously held positions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frick Collection, and Harvard Art Museums, among other institutions. She holds M.A. degrees from Parsons the New School for Design, The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and is completing her PhD at Harvard University. Her work, which focuses on seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art, environmental histories, and colonial legacies, has appeared in numerous publications, most recently the volume Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade (Brill, 2025), for which she was co-editor and co-author.

Links to more information:

Rembrandt’s Lions: Art and Exile in the Dutch Republic: https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/rembrandts-lions

 

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