Toward the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century the production, reception, and culture of collectable prints in Holland underwent a shift, congruent with the publishing boom that centered in Amsterdam. In particular, the compositional techniques and rhetorical strategies of prints depicting cities like Haarlem and Amsterdam embraced a communicentric typography that privileged the viewer’s existing relationship with his or her city and its specific cultural character. However, prints of this sort can take on vastly different appearances depending their intended use and audience. This visual variance is no more apparent than in print images depicting New Netherland. This paper argues that collectable prints, and those included in more ambitious travel books, depicting the Dutch foreign settlement utilize a more distanced, chorographic compositional approach that implicitly suggests the ephemeral nature of Holland’s physical investment in the New World.

In contrast to the colonial powers of Spain and England, the Dutch were not interested in permanent imperial expansion, only short-term resource management and trade monopolization. The prints depicting New World settlements suggest this colonial tepidity. First, I explore the culturally engaged and socially intimate nature of prints depicting Haarlem and Amsterdam. Print series such as Claes Jansz. Visscher's Pleasant Places (1611) utilize a combination of intra-cultural iconography and communicentric compositional strategies to reinforce the viewer’s identification with his or her home city. In these images, the viewer is placed within the city, surrounded by its culture and architectural environments. Second, I expand this analysis of the communicentric view to draw rhetorical comparisons between images of Dutch cities and those of the settlements in New Netherland. Prints in early publications such as van der Donck’s Beschrijvinghe van Nieuw Nederlandt (1651) and those by Nicolaes Visscher (1618-1679) utilize a chorographic view to totalize the New World into an exploitable resource for temporary investment, not a site for permanent territorial settlement. The Dutch claim was not to alluvial land, but to the ethos of trade. Third, I analyze chorographic prints of New Netherland through the lens of period art theory to explore how these images constitute subtle visual arguments in line with Classical rhetorical theory. In these images, however, there is a tension between the chorographic compositional strategy that objectifies the settlement in the Ptolemaic sense, and the impulse to edit imagery for the sake of marketability. Ultimately, these images subtly betray claims to anything but obeisance to the fickle oscillations of a globalizing market.