Landscape painting was another of the genres that had developed little before the Dutch Golden Age, when it became one of the most popular. It also proved an interesting challenge for its exponents, who had to fill their canvases with a land that was almost completely flat. The favoured solution was to look to the heavens, resulting in the first cloudscapes.

Simon de Vlieger’s Beach View from 1643 uses boats, many figures, and careful composition to swell the land over the bottom of its panel. It shows well, though, how important is the sky, marvellously rendered here, with a small group of white birds shown against the grey of the clouds. De Vlieger was born in Rotterdam, and painted in Delft and Amsterdam, where he was best known for his landscapes.

Jan van Goyen’s View of Dordrecht with the Grote Kirk Across the Maas from 1644 is another example of a low horizon cramming a lot of detail into the foot of the painting, leaving the major part devoted to sky.

The action and excitement, even fear, in Aelbert Cuyp’s Thunderstorm over Dordrecht from about 1645 is in its bolt of lightning, with the cattle lying passive in the fields below.

At about the same time, Jacob van Ruisdael painted his first panoramic landscape, this View of Naarden and the Church of Muiderberg from 1647. Still working on a very wide support orientated conventionally in ‘landscape’ mode, his immense sky is no passive backdrop to the land, but the scene of intriguing cloud formations.

Salomon van Ruysdael filled his panels and canvases with the sky, as in his View of Alkmaar from the Sea from about 1650, where he has turned his panel from the usual ‘landscape’ mode. Clouds had now become subjects in their own right, and differences in their form and texture some of the most important features.

At their best, Cuyp’s coastal landscapes, such as The Maas at Dordrecht from about 1650, are full of rich light, earning him the nickname of the Dutch Claude Lorrain. This shows a passage boat packed with passengers, together with its drummer, below a finely detailed sky.

Cuyp also populated the strip at the foot of his landscapes with farm animals. In his Cows in a River from about 1650, the landscape has been minimised to concentrate on the cattle, although most of his panel is still taken by its striking sky.

Unless backed by elevated dunes, there was no way that an artist could expand thin strips of beach and sea. The dominant towers of cumulus clouds in Adriaen van de Velde’s View of a Beach from 1663-65 have become his subjects.

Jacob van Ruisdael also turned his canvases for these portraits of towering clouds, as in his View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields from about 1665. The distant town of Haarlem with its monumentally large church of Saint Bavo – works of man – are dwarfed by these high cumulus clouds, the works of God. This motif proved so popular that van Ruisdael painted many variants of the same view, making it now one of the most widespread landscapes across the galleries of Europe.

Other artists like Philip de Koninck marvelled at cloud formations, here in his River Landscape from just after the end of the Golden Age, in 1676.