(b Amsterdam or Friesland, c. 1652; (d Richmond, Surrey, c. 1700). Dutch painter, active in England. After training in Amsterdam under Allert van Everdingen, he travelled c. 1670 to London, where he found a ready market for his decorative landscapes among English collectors. Competing with many other minor Dutch artists working for the Restoration court, he produced both imaginary and topographical landscapes suitable for installation as overdoors. Van Edema’s idealized Italianate views were especially commended by contemporaries such as Buckridge, but many of his characteristically mountainous compositions belong to the northern landscape tradition. He probably followed van Everdingen’s example in deriving inspiration from Scandinavian scenery, and his works frequently evoke a wild vision of nature that drew on his experiences travelling to Newfoundland, the West Indies and Dutch Guyana (now Surinam). His affinity for awe-inspiring mountains, steep precipices, rocky gorges, torrential rivers and cascades appealed to aristocratic collectors, such as the Earl of Sunderland, the Duke of Schomberg, the Earl of Radnor and Lord Ranelagh. The artist’s versatility ranged from conventional rural or classicizing landscapes, such as those acquired for the British Royal Collection, to monumental canvases, such as those at Chatsworth, Derbys, in which the expansive scale and power of nature overwhelms the diminutive presence of man. His skill at painting waterfalls especially impressed the writer Marshall Smith, and subsequent remarks about his work, as in Walpole’s Anecdotes, suggest that van Edema collaborated both with the marine painter Willem van de Velde the younger and with the battle-piece and sporting painter Jan Wijck. There is a livelier element of fantasy in his landscapes than in the more topographical works of other fellow Dutchmen in England, for instance Adrien van Diest, Jan Griffier I or Leonard Knyff; and the degree of drama in some of van Edema’s more ambitious pictures (e.g. the Mountainous Landscape with Devastated Fir Trees; Chatsworth, Derbys) verges on the Sublime. Van Edema’s work contributed to the evolution of the Picturesque and to some small extent to the foundation of landscape painting as a genre for further development by the emerging native British school at the end of the 17th century.