Sometimes people are disappointed with the quality of exhibitions visiting Japan, but there are no reservations about the superb drawings now at the Tobu Museum of Art.

"Landscape with Ruined Bridge" (c. 1645) by Jan Asselijn

To illustrate the theme of "landscapes in the making," nearly 100 drawings and several prints have been selected from the extensive collection of London University's Courtauld Gallery, one of Britain's leading institutions of art.

This exhibition can be enjoyed on several levels. Firstly, for the talent of the 16th- and 17th-century Flemish and Dutch draftsmen. Here are rustling woodlands, sun-dappled valleys and old villages where it is a delight to linger. Then, informal sketches, sometimes scribbled on both sides of the paper, show the eyes and hands of artists at work. Also, there are detailed, incredibly skillful works that reveal the true value of drawings as finished works of art.

"As students of art history we were always told about drawings in relation to paintings," says William Bradford, senior curator at the Courtauld Gallery. "But this is a 19th-century outlook.

"In fact, if you look at drawings you see an entirely different history. Drawings were a field of experimentation for artists. After all, it was a very cheap and easy medium to use."

Also, there was a ready market in the Netherlands for landscape drawings, as the country was directly connected to the tumultuous events of the age. From the 1560s until the 1640s, the provinces were fighting for independence from Spain. There was a pressing military need for accurate maps, and the development of topography and landscape drawing was closely connected.

With redrawn boundaries and political freedom came a lively interest in the new national identity. Maps and landscapes hung in many a home. The ruins, castles and fields of battle featured in many of these drawings had a profound meaning for people commemorating their long, heroic struggle with Spain.

Also, for a trading nation, the maps, which were increasingly illustrated with drawings of cities, rural surroundings and people, were both informative and inspiring.

"Instead of watching television, people would open up a map and trace journeys," said Bradford, conjuring up an image of a Vermeer interior with a family gathered round the table.

In a similar way, the green and pleasant landscapes were a journey of the imagination. The late 16th and early 17th centuries were an era of rapid urbanization, and by 1620 almost half the population of Holland lived in towns.

Not surprisingly, city dwellers dreamed of rural retreats, and city wealth gave added impetus to the development of landscape art. The rich bought paintings and drawings, while a growing number of print makers catered to the more modest home.

The 17th century was also a time of great land reclamation schemes, when the Low Countries were again shaping their destiny and rising from the waters. The fascination with water, land and sky reflects a Biblical symbolism, as well as a distinctive sense of man in relation to the vast forces of nature.

Around 1620, handy new chalks, graphite and sketchbooks supplemented the traditional tools of pen and ink, and artists made fervent use of them to extend the boundaries of the genre.

"All the landscape conventions that were invented in Holland and Flanders during those centuries are still in use today," says Bradford. "They were used by Turner, Girton, the Impressionists and so on. The reasons for using these conventions may have changed, but the formalism is the same."

The variety speaks for itself. Here are framed views with repoussoirs and carefully balanced near, middle and far distances to satisfy the fussiest Academician; fantastic vistas and gorges, reducing man to a speck of nature, which would warm the heart of a Wordsworth; studies of rocky outcrops and wild campagna that would delight even Ruskin; and scenes of ordinary villages and canals, the unpretentious ground that Pissarro explored nearly three centuries later.

There are also pioneering landscapes of the distinctive Dutch school by leading artists such as Jan van Goyen. He was one of the first to capture the atmosphere of scenes such as the "River Delta" of 1653, with its vast, light-filled sky and moving clouds. A gnarled old oak tree, shown in a vivid sketch, is often featured in his paintings.

From the mid-18th to 19th centuries there was a dismissive view of Dutch landscape art as "mere topography." During the classical revival, well-educated people preferred their sylvan scenes in the manner of Nicholas Poussin, scattered with mythological allusions. During the age of Byron, exaggerated scenery provoked a Romantic thrill. Quiet Dutch landscapes, with their realism and bourgeois activities, were considered neither imaginative nor spiritually elevating.

Old art-history theory conveniently separates Dutch realism from classical landscapes, but the Dutch Italianates blur that distinction. Here are the ruins, heroes and shepherds one usually sees in an idealized landscape. Yet unlike Claude Lorrain, who wished to paint landscapes more beautiful than those found in nature, these artists tend to favor the actual. Instead of peasants dancing in a golden never-never land, the figures here are drawing water, sleeping in the shade of a wall, or striding by rivers as their dogs race behind.

The early 17th-century drawings of Roman ruins presage the following century's interest in antiquities, but there are no grandiose gestures toward philosophy. Artists such as Cornelis van Poelenburch compose harmonies of crumbling stone and luxuriant overgrowth, which sing quietly of "time's wing'd chariot" passing by.

Perhaps there was romance and mystery enough in the sun-baked hills of Italy for these travelers from the Low Countries. Drawings such as Nicholaes Berchem's "River Landscape with Tower" and Adriaen Honich's stunning "View of Tivoli" are drawn with rapture, the artists eager to document the scene before their eyes, and at the same time to capture its poetry.

In 1608 Claes Jan Visscher, the map and print-maker, sent out an invitation to city dwellers "to have a quick look at pleasant places, you art lovers who have no time to travel far." Four centuries later, the invitation is as appealing as ever.