The Farm Book

Editor Joan Fisher. Introduction by Robert Elman. From the d.j.: "People can be divided into two groups: those who grew up on a farm and those who wish they had grown up on a farm. This book will please, surprise, and inform both. Hundreds of full-color illustrations, rendered with perception, wit, and accuracy, offer a heart-warming look at life on the farm--the way it was and the way it is, though now only in remote areas such as the author/illustrator's own, which happens to be in Holland."

The begining of Robert Elman's Introduction: "Rien Poortvliet is a vivid chronicler of Dutch life and landscape, a genre painter who seldom wanders far in search of subjects for his pen and brushes. Yet his work has been welcomed as enthusiastically in America as it has been in Europe. Clearly the reason is that his seemingly provincial, rural themes are astonishingly cosmopolitan, his insights and appeal international. He is a latter-day Boswell (and occasionally a Hogarth) on tour in his own land, the kind of painter who understands how William Blake could see the world in a grain of sand. The unique has universal implications. More can be seen in a Dutch barnyard than merely one corner of Dirksland or Frisia."

More from Elman: "Poortvliet is, of course, a modern watercolorist, and the intention here is not to liken his technique or accomplishment to that of Bruegel. All the same, there is an inescapable relationship of viewpoint and subject matter--people, animals, feasting, carousing, mating, religious worship, labor, the harvest, and so on. A Poortvliet farm dog does not simply pause beside a milk can but lifts its leg. Bruegel would have smiled and nodded."