The Milkmaid
Johannes Vermeer · 1660
Dutch Golden Age painting
Dutch Republic
A young republic grown rich on trade filled its homes with pictures: in seventeenth-century Holland, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals and their contemporaries painted portraits, streets, kitchens and the sea for buyers who were burghers like themselves.
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Play CollectionA new art for a new republic
Dutch Golden Age painting covers roughly the seventeenth century, the years in which the new Dutch Republic won independence and became the most prosperous nation in Europe, leading its trade and its science. The war and the break with the old monarchist and Catholic culture forced Dutch art to remake itself from the ground up, and it did.
What that remaking produced was a huge secular market. Religious painting, which the Calvinist churches would not hang, collapsed, and buyers wanted everything else instead: portraits of themselves, taverns, church interiors, canal skies, flowers, fish. From the late 1620s until the French invasion of 1672, the core of the period, painters specialised by type and even by sub-type, and much of what the West now thinks of as genre painting or landscape was invented, in its modern form, for these houses.
Rembrandt
Rembrandt, born at Leiden in 1606, was in Amsterdam by about 1631, when the port was the richest in the north. He soon stood at the top of the profession there, the centre of a busy studio whose pupils included the young Gerrit Dou. His range ran through every subject the market wanted and past it: militia portraits that behave like theatre, biblical scenes read as human drama, and self-portraits that keep an unflinching account of his own face.
Vermeer's quiet rooms
At the other extreme stands Johannes Vermeer of Delft: one of the great Dutch masters, yet only about thirty-five paintings by him survive. He worked slowly, and died insolvent in 1675. His few rooms, a woman reading, a maid pouring milk, a girl turning in the light, are the quietest and most looked-at pictures of the age.
The comic and the fine
Between those two poles worked a whole profession. Jan Steen of Leiden, who also worked in Haarlem, Utrecht and The Hague, painted the disorderly households and muddled feasts the Dutch loved to laugh at and be warned by. Frans Hals, Antwerp-born but Haarlem's painter for life, gave portraiture its speed. And Gerrit Dou, Rembrandt's first pupil and founder of the Leiden fine painters, took finish to a shine the century never beat, and was reckoned among the most famous of all Dutch painters into the early nineteenth century.
Artists
Rembrandt
Leiden-born, Amsterdam-made: the most famous artist in the city, whose militia portrait of 1642 turns a roll-call into a scene moving through light.
Delft's master of the quiet room: perhaps thirty-five paintings in all, each holding one figure and one window's worth of daylight.
Leiden's comic moralist: households gone to seed, feasts that teach, painted with a straight face and a wink.
Born in Antwerp but Haarlem's own for a working lifetime; the loose, quick brush that made Dutch portraiture look alive.
Rembrandt's first pupil and the founder of the Leiden fine painters, whose polished surfaces were prized above almost any Dutch art for two centuries.
Artworks
The Jewish Bride
Rembrandt · 1667
The Jewish Bride. A couple stands in half-dark, his hand on her shoulder, the paint laid on so thickly that Rembrandt scratched into it with the butt of his brush. Painted around 1665 to 1669.
The Art of Painting
Johannes Vermeer · 1667
The Art of Painting. The painter at his easel, a model crowned with laurel holding trumpet and book, a map of the Netherlands on the wall behind. Long read as an allegory of the art itself, it is the most intricate composition Vermeer ever made.
The Little Street
Johannes Vermeer · 1658
The Little Street. Two house fronts, a canal-side gutter, women at their work: a corner of Delft standing for every street in Holland. The houses are the ones at Vlamingstraat 40 to 42 in Delft.
Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window
Johannes Vermeer · 1658
Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. A girl absorbed in a letter, the window light doing the rest. Dresden has owned it since 1742, and for most of that time a blank wall hung behind her; restoration between 2018 and 2021 uncovered the Cupid picture Vermeer had painted there, hidden for centuries.
The Lacemaker
Johannes Vermeer · 1669
The Lacemaker. A young woman in a yellow bodice sets a pin into her bobbin lace, threads and hands brought to the very front of the picture plane. It is the smallest painting Vermeer left, and among the strangest and most admired.
Aristotle with a Bust of Homer
Rembrandt · 1653
Aristotle with a Bust of Homer. The philosopher in his gold chain rests a hand on the sculpted head of the poet, thinking. Painted in 1653 for a Sicilian patron who left the subject to Rembrandt.
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp
Rembrandt · 1632
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp. The surgeon demonstrates the muscles of a dead man's arm to the doctors gathered around, every face turned to a different angle of attention. Made for the Surgeons' Guild to hang in their meeting room, it counts among the early masterpieces of his career.
Belshazzar's Feast
Rembrandt · 1636
Belshazzar's Feast. The Babylonian king recoils as a disembodied hand writes Hebrew on his palace wall. Around 1636 to 1638, and deliberately grand in scale and ornament.
Syndics of the Drapers' Guild
Rembrandt · 1662
Syndics of the Drapers' Guild. Five officials of the Amsterdam cloth trade and their servant look up from their ledger as if the visitor has interrupted them. Of all Rembrandt's group portraits, this one is regularly called the last and one of the greatest.
Self Portrait with Beret and Turned-Up Collar
Rembrandt · 1659
Self Portrait with Beret and Turned-Up Collar. One of more than forty self-portraits: the face lit from above right, the skin built in thick pigment, the whole picture held in browns and greys, sombre and subtle in equal measure.
Wine is a Mocker
Jan Steen · 1668
Wine is a Mocker. Outside an inn, a well-dressed woman, drunk, is to be wheeled home in a barrow; the proverb that names the picture is written over the door. Steen, who kept a tavern himself, makes the lesson funny before it lands.
'As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young'
Jan Steen · 1665
As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young. Three generations of one family at table, the elders drinking and puffing while the smallest copy them. Steen painted the subject thirteen times; of the many renditions, this Mauritshuis version is the exemplar of the series.
Sources
- Wikipedia, “Dutch Golden Age painting”
- National Gallery, London, “Rembrandt”
- National Gallery, London, “Johannes Vermeer”
- National Gallery, London, “Jan Steen”
- National Gallery, London, “Frans Hals”
- National Gallery, London, “Gerrit Dou”
- Rijksmuseum, “Isaac and Rebecca, Known as ‘The Jewish Bride’”
- Rijksmuseum, “View of Houses in Delft, Known as ‘The Little Street’”
- National Gallery, London, “Rembrandt, Belshazzar's Feast”
- Wikipedia, “The Art of Painting”
- Wikipedia, “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window”
- Wikipedia, “The Lacemaker”
- Wikipedia, “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer”
- Wikipedia, “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp”
- Wikipedia, “Syndics of the Drapers' Guild”
- Wikipedia, “Self-Portrait with Beret and Turned-Up Collar”
- Wikipedia, “Wine is a Mocker”
- Wikipedia, “As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young”
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