Although famous for its thriving and dynamic art market, the Dutch Republic was also home to more amateur artists than anywhere else in seventeenth-century Europe, and many of them were talented artists. Favoring sketching landscapes from nature as a recreational pastime, these non-professional practitioners enacted intertwining ideals of art and leisure that governed the status of landscape representation in the early modern discourse on art. This social construct of sketching nature as a pastime or diversion also shaped the landscapes of prominent history painters, including Rembrandt, whose many landscape drawings of Amsterdam’s suburban countryside were made on sketching excursions sometimes in the company of his amateur pupils, and correspond in key respects with amateur landscape art. Drawn exclusively during the years he lived in a ruinously expensive house in a fashionable Amsterdam neighborhood, Rembrandt's sketches of identifiable sites along the Amstel River were rarely preparatory to more formal works, indicating that his sketching excursions, like those of Dutch amateurs, were not solely a professional or commercial undertaking. In Rembrandt's time, moreover, landscape sketches by famous painters were identified reflexively with the non-market ethics of gift exchange. In 1618 the English miniaturist and gentleman Edward Norgate commented that artists’ “first and sleight drawings,” specifically landscapes, are “things never sold but given to frends [sic] that are Leefhebbers [art lovers].” For Norgate, the early modern construct of landscape drawing as a recreation converged with the discourse of the gift to define the allure of artworks that lay beyond the reach of the market. The aestheticized social arenas of amateurism, landscape representation, and gift exchange, when seen together, therefore offer a conceptual framework to historicize and rethink a significant body of early modern artworks that defy categorization as either marketable productions or purely personal artistic exercises.