Dutch Golden Age painting for beginners

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

After winning independence from Spain, the northern Netherlands became the Dutch Republic, a mostly Protestant, commercial society made rich by trade. Its painters produced an astonishing number of pictures in the seventeenth century, and many of them are quiet: a kitchen, a canal, a vase of flowers, a face. I find that quiet as powerful as any Baroque altarpiece.

Three layers

Historical What the works and the documents show. Later tradition Myths that grew around the artists. Modern How we use the images today.

An open market

Historical Dutch Calvinist churches did not commission religious images. Instead a broad public of merchants, artisans and professionals bought paintings for their homes. An open market developed, and painters specialized in landscapes, seascapes, still lifes, portraits, church interiors and scenes of daily life, called genre painting.

The money came in large part from the Dutch East India Company and West India Company, which were involved in colonial violence and the Atlantic slave trade. The Rijksmuseum’s 2021 exhibition Slavery looked at this history directly, and I think every lover of these paintings should know it.

Rembrandt

Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, 1660. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (14.40.618). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 to 1669) worked in Amsterdam. The Night Watch (1642), in the Rijksmuseum, turned a militia group portrait into a scene of movement, light and shadow, and since 2019 it has been studied and conserved in public view in Operation Night Watch. Rembrandt painted and drew himself all his life. In this self-portrait of 1660 his face is shown with unsparing directness. He went bankrupt in 1656, but the idea that he died forgotten is false; he kept receiving commissions.

Vermeer and the window light

Historical Johannes Vermeer of Delft (1632 to 1675) left only about thirty-five paintings, mostly women in quiet rooms lit from a window on the left. In the Met’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, about 1662, light passes through the leaded glass onto a white headcloth, a blue cloth and a silver basin. Some researchers think he used a camera obscura, an optical box that projects an image; others disagree, and it remains a hypothesis.

Leyster and Ruysch

Judith Leyster, Self-Portrait, about 1630. National Gallery of Art, Washington, image via Google Arts and Culture. Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Historical Judith Leyster (1609 to 1660) became a master in the Haarlem painters’ guild and painted lively musicians and genre scenes. In her self-portrait of about 1630, now in Washington, she turns from the easel as if we just walked in. Rachel Ruysch (1664 to 1750) became one of the most successful flower painters of her age. In 1710 a Leiden collector paid 1,300 guilders for a pair of her flower pieces.

The esoteric angle

Historical Many Dutch still lifes are vanitas pictures, from the Latin for emptiness. Skulls, burnt-down candles, hourglasses, wilting flowers and soap bubbles remind the viewer that life is short. We know this meaning because emblem books of the time spell it out, such as Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593, illustrated 1603) and Roemer Visscher’s emblems (1614). Dutch and Flemish painters also made a whole genre of alchemists at work in cluttered rooms, often mocking them as fools who wasted their families’ money.

Later tradition The story of tulip mania in 1636 to 1637, when bulbs supposedly sold for the price of houses, is told everywhere. The historian Anne Goldgar has argued that its extent and damage were greatly exaggerated.

Modern Today many people build memento mori altars or meditations from vanitas imagery. That is a modern use of a historical symbol, and a beautiful one.

Try it yourself

Place Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher beside Caravaggio’s The Musicians (Met 52.81) on your screen. Write five words for the mood of each. Then list the choices behind the mood: light, color, gesture, space. Both are called Baroque. What separates them?

Before and after

Before this: Baroque.

After this: Rococo.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.