In the northern provinces of the Netherlands, Dutch Baroque artists, appealing to a prosperous merchant class, achieved a heightened sense of realism in portraiture and in landscape and genre painting. The representation of native Dutch themes, domestic interiors, and objects became distinctive features of the Dutch school of art.
The Dutch Wars of Independence
In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch (northern) Netherlands, free from Spanish dominion but plagued by numerous wars, assumed a leading role among European nations in art, scholarship, science, and trade. The thriving Dutch East India Company
The Anatomy of Dr. Tulp (1632) established Rembrandt as a master painter in the competitive world of portraiture in Amsterdam. The work was his first major group portrait, depicting an anatomist and his students.
Along with the nation’s increased wealth and independence came an atmosphere of tolerance and innovation. Lacking support from the Roman Catholic Church and the Habsburg nobility, Dutch artists were compelled to seek new clients and adapt their craft if they were to survive in the evolving marketplace. The nascent Calvinist church, fraught with controversy and iconoclastic zeal, did not offer a suitable alternative. Appealing instead to the republican tastes of wealthy merchants, patricians, aristocrats, guilds, and local government, innovative artists abandoned the flamboyant Baroque style favored by Church and aristocracy in other parts of Europe and offered instead a greater sense of realism in portraiture and in landscape and genre painting.
In the absence of munificent patrons, artists produced noncommissioned art for sale on an open market. This represented a noteworthy evolution in the way art was produced. Paintings tended to be smaller in size, not only to limit the artist’s production expenditures but also to accommodate the average Dutch burgher’s budget and the space available for artistic display in homes. According to Philips Angel’s Lof der schilder-konst (in praise of painting), a speech before the Leiden painters’ guild in 1641 and published the following year, a painter’s primary task was to delight the beholder’s eye. Although academic theory from Carel van Mander’s
Het schilder-boeck (1604; The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters
Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst
Jan Vermeer’s well-known, oft-reproduced painting, The Artist and His Studio (1665-1670), is a premier example of Dutch genre painting, with its attention to detail, intense natural light, and its reverence for the common.
The Golden Age of Dutch painting spans roughly three generations of artists, including Frans Hals,
Specialization in one style of painting was also common among Dutch artists. A host of painters sometimes referred to as the Little Masters specialized in specific types of small-format still life, landscape, or genre painting. Jan Josephszoon van Goyen,
“Genre painting,” a term introduced by eighteenth and nineteenth century art historians, refers to scenes of everyday life, depictions of anonymous people engaged in ordinary activities in their natural surroundings. Closely related to portraiture, Dutch genre painting reflects the unique qualities of middle-class and peasant culture in the United Netherlands in the manner of realism, or a credible illusion thereof. Jan Steen
Vermeer, a master in the genre, included maps, globes, and Asian tapestries as part of his interior decor, reminding viewers of the preeminent status of the Netherlands as a seafaring and trading nation. Vermeer’s The Astronomer
As art historians readily confirm, the catalog of Dutch artists active during the seventeenth century is quite extensive. Only about one percent of the 17 million paintings thought to have been produced in the northern provinces of the Netherlands between 1600 and 1700 are believed to still exist, yet they are among the most valued pieces in museums throughout the Western world, attracting throngs of admirers each year.
The Little Masters were, above all, intent on creating objects of beauty pleasing to the eye. Also, in the absence of hidden narratives, their paintings typically reveal more than the artists consciously intended. As documents of social history, they are reminders of a period when the middle-class became major consumers of art, a defining moment in European history, when market trends and popular demand dictated an artist’s choice of genre, subject, style, and methods of production.
One of the most endearing features of Dutch landscape and genre paintings lies in their representations of regional themes and motifs that seem to capture the very essence of seventeenth century Dutch society. Partly an illusion, perhaps, but one of enduring artistic charm.
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Brown, Christopher. Dutch Landscape, the Early Years: Haarlem and Amsterdam, 1590-1650. London: Westerman Press, 1986. Multiple prefaces to this catalog of 118 prints provide detailed discussion of Dutch landscape painting. -
Ebert-Schifferer, Sybille. Still Life: A History. Translated by Russell Stockman. New York: Abrams, 1999. A comprehensive study of still life painting and its history, from antiquity to seventeenth century Dutch painting and beyond. -
Franits, Wayne. Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. A collection of articles by fourteen specialists covering major research trends. -
Grijzehout, Frans, and Henk van Veen. The Golden Age of Dutch Painting in Historical Perspective. Translated by Andrew McCormick. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Thirteen chapters by art historians investigate the reception of Dutch Baroque art from its origins to modern trends in research. -
Muizelaar, Klaske, and Derek Phillips. Picturing Men and Women in the Dutch Golden Age: Paintings and People in Historical Perspective. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. Examines some of the ideological underpinnings of Dutch Golden Age painting. -
North, Michael. Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age. Translated by Catherine Hill. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. Statistics on the historical, sociological, and economic context of Golden Age artists and art patrons. -
Riegl, Alois. The Group Portraiture of Holland. Translations by Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999. A classic collection of writings by the German art historian Alois Riegl (1858-1909), covering three stages of Dutch portraiture, including two in the seventeenth century. Includes an introduction by Wolfgang Kemp. -
Slive, Seymour. Dutch Painting, 1600-1800. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. A survey of Dutch painting, with sections devoted to Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and de Hooch, and to portraiture and still life, landscape, marine, and architectural painting.
Giovanna Garzoni; Frans Hals; Rembrandt; Jan Vermeer.