dutch painters 18th century

2021/05/21

November 11, 2008 to February 15, 2009.

Boijmans-van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, by Bernd Lindemann

(The Dutch national anthem stems from those days, and still contains a line in which William says, "I have always honored the King of Spain.")

Peter C. Sutton et al.

Landscape, portraiture and still life, which had existed for centuries, were re-examined in a fresh light and brought to hitherto unprecedented levels of naturalness. Painting in the Seventeenth Century,

Making the mistake of many statesmen before and since, Philip imagined that the war was kept going by a few men rather than by deep-seated social conflicts.

For or example, in 1644 the Board of the Dutch East India Company stated that their holdings in the Far East were not Dutch conquests but "the property of private merchants, who were entitled to sell those places to whomever they pleased, even if it were to the King of Spain."

Tobacco was as popular then as now-it was first brought from the West Indies and the Americas in the 1500s-and the unsavory dens where the common man enjoyed his smoke made a favorite subject for such genre painters as Adriaen Brouwer and Adriaen van Ostade. and Shipwreck in Dutch and Flemish The highest rewards carne tram the trade in spices, the most coveted product of the East Indies. For all practical purposes, the United Provinces were free to develop as an independent nation from the first years of the century.

Most of the paintings cast an aura of calm well-being, an illusion that may well have represented the Dutchman's longing for a security and tranquility he had never actually known. The mariners built strong points on distant shores to protect their ships and stores tram natives or marauding European ships; the strong points became forts, the forts led to further conquests. For the Dutch revolution was, of course, not the brainchild of one man or his family.

Critics and scholars disagree over how many he undertook, but whatever the actual number, it is a staggering collection including approximately 45 paintings, 30 etchings and seven drawings. Painting. Now, an exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C. is working to rectify this imbalance: Titled Women Artists of the Dutch Golden Age, the show features 20 paintings and prints by female painters active in the Netherlands during the 17th and early 18th centuries. Lesser eventsincluding a child's beginning school or apprenticeship, the purchase of a new house, or a loved one's departure on a long journey or his return homewere also acknowledged with feasts. " technique of advertising. Although women were frequently portrayed in Golden Age paintings, female painters of the period rarely received recognition. Truthful as seventeenth-century Dutch art was in mirroring it: age, there were a few aspects of contemporary lire that were largely ignored by the painters. His early work has the mark of Bosch all over it, but tempered by changes in Christian morality caused by figures such as Martin Luther. in Art: Studies in Seventeenth- Wine was imported from France, Italy and Spain, and beer from Germany.

Gods, Most are familiar with towering figures like Rembrandt or Vermeer, but there is more to an art movement than two figures. From then until almost 100 years later, with the death of Johan Blaeu, son of the cartographer and map publisher Willem Blaeu, Dutch map making was the finest in Europe. Rembrandt to Vermeer. In the painting of Vermeer in particular, we can see the fundamental characteristics of Dutch painting, love of light and the common human experience of everyday life, brought to their highest levels of artistic expression. Grard, who had spent two years on his plot, was immediately captured, and his only reward was a quick trial, torture and death at the hands of an outraged citizenry. Faces of the Manage My Data

Instead of negotiating with them, the King's representative in the Netherlands had taken them prisoner. Eschewing the romanticisation of the peasantry practiced by many of his contemporaries, Steen altered composition forever by introducing untidiness into his work to reflect human untidiness over sanitised depictions of everyday life.

Just as surely as they guided Holland's politics and economics, these prosperous merchants were also instrumental in the development of Dutch art. Holland emerged from these upheavals as an aggressive, Protestant republic with a capitalistic economy and a bourgeois society.

These countries were amazed and annoyed by Holland's success and consoled themselves by thinking it could not last long. Explore Holland with our guide to its best Old Masters.

As a matter of fact, it did not. Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Vermeer

Perhaps the greatest and most famous portrait painter of all time, Rembrandt van Rijn was a master of observation, chiaroscuro and, perhaps most importantly, brutal honesty, as seen in his most famous works, the self-portraits. The social system in the south was still feudal, dominated by an aristocracy that was largely French-speaking and not nationally oriented. The evolution of these two schools of painting was clearly related to the political developments of the war.

Later, the resistance to Spain became a democraticor rather, a bourgeois-revolution; at first, however, it was led by princes and counts. They were the Counts of Egmont and Hoorn, who had sought some relief for their country from the oppressive rule of the King of Spain.

Dutch vessels had become the freight carriers of Europe. Increasingly wealthy and numerousin Amsterdam alone, the population had grown from 60,000 inhabitants in 1600 to 135,000 in 1640and in step with the European nobility, the urban upper class had discovered that paintings were a symbol of power, objects to be collected avidly.

Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age

New York: Westview Press, 1978. Morose, dictatorial, fanatically Catholic, the new King hated the north, and cared for nothing but Spain and his religion. The competition was so sharp that few could prosper. The truth was that these nations, land wealthy but economically backward, were still bound by the fetters of feudalism and ancient financial practices.

Earthly humor, often with satirical overtones, was another specialty of Dutch art. However, Alva's harshness and the King' s refusal to compromise slowly pushed William toward an ever-more-extreme position.

After years of struggle against Spanish domination, the northern provinces won their independence in 1609.

But during most of the seventeenth century, these tendencies had not yet come to the surface. The result was not only a vivid portrait of a nation and a time but a brilliant chapter in art history as well. Love Letters: Dutch Genre Paintings in the Age of Vermeer, exh. But it seems that even larger numbers were put on sale than the market could easily absorb.

The workhouse, the poorhouse, slum living and child labor were all evident. Spices such as black pepper, cloves and cinnamon helped preserve and make palatable the dreary food of an age whose only other means of food preservation were pickling and salting.

Civil Values in 17th-century Flemish and Dutch Painting They were, nevertheless, an effective weapon in the fight against Spain. cat., Grand Rapids Art Museum. Thousands of acres of farm land were spoiled by the flooding, but time and again during the war the Dutch made similar sacrifices such as burning their own crops to aid the fight against the hated Spaniard. So he issued an infamous "ban" which described William as "chief disturber of all Christendom and especially these Netherlands."

So the furniture of a middle-class house at the beginning of the century was not very different from what would have been found in the late Middle Ages: a few tables, cupboards, a linen closet, several alcove beds built into the walls, a desk.

The northern provinces had been part of the duchy of Burgundy in the past, which was still alive in the seventeenth century.

Toward the end of the age, the English wrested control of the seas from the Dutch Navy and in 1672 French troops overran most of the northern provinces.

When Philip took over his followers took great pains to protest their continued loyalty to their overlord. New York, 1967, pp.

This lead to a great demand for paintings, but almost exclusively paintings at low prices. Painting from the Heinz Family Collection, Fashion

This can best be seen on his most famous work Girl With a Pearl Earring, in which the interplay of light upon the various fabrics and the wonderful reflection shining on that pearl earring make it one of the masterpieces of western art. Two years later they took the final step of rebellion: they abjured the King of Spain as their legal lord. 1983. Terms of Use But it was at least a society in which the "unfortunate" poor (as distinct from able-bodied vagrants) were supplied with fare meant to approximate to the diet of the more fortunate rather than stigmatize their wretchedness with a regimen of didactic meanness.

A notable exception was Leyster, one of only two women to gain admission to Haarlems prestigious Guild of St. Luke during the 17th century. Most popular was the Bible, in a new official Dutch translation; next came the poems of Jacob Cats, whose homilies and morality verses were found in almost every own household-by 1665 an illustrated collection of Cast's works had sold 50,000 copies. Nevertheless, the following year 22 more ships left for the Far East, and from then on the number increased steadily and rapidly. No assassination, no siege, no battle could undo the inexorable shift of the war in favor of Holland.

This new school of painting was actually a branch of the Flemish art that in earlier centuries had produced such masters as the Van Eycks, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel. A Moral Compass: Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Painting in the Netherlands, exh. The war had not only set the boundaries of the new nation (as an 18th Century chronicler put it, "Mars had stood over the birth as midwife") but it had also changed its spirit. Much less wealth seeped down to the lowest classes than is often assumed from the neat streets and well-ordered households that appear in so many of the era's paintings. Many Dutch burghers even celebrated jokmaalen, a feast of inversion during which masters and mistresses waited on their servants. These policies paid enormous dividends to the investors in the trade. One is again reminded of the course of events leading to the American Revolution. William disapproved of their unsavory tactics and only reluctantly recognized them as part of his forces.

All this was strictly a business operation. Since the Middle Ages, the town councils had been made up of the "most wise and rich" citizens: now, with trade the lifeblood of the country, the "most wise and rich" simply meant the most successful merchants.

Like many from the Golden Age of Dutch Painting, Vermeers fascination was light, and the faithful and beautiful reproduction of it on canvas. Philadelphia, 1984.

Whereas the masterworks created by women in paintings past have often been left undiscovered, Rachel Ruysch achieved international fame in her own lifetime over a very long career specialising in flower paintings full of the vibrancy of colour and delicate interplay of light and darkness we have come to expect from Dutch Golden Age painting. Another visitor added, "They would prefer to die of hunger surrounded by their shining cauldrons and sparkling crockery rather than prepare any dish that might possibly disarrange this perfect symmetry"- an observation that seems not quite so far-fetched after a study of the spotless kitchens portrayed in so many seventeenth-century canvases.

Marit Westermann, Art and Museum of Art, Denver, 2001. Women Artists of the Dutch Golden Age is on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) through January 5, 2020. Books were published in great numbers and institutes for higher education. John Michael Montias, Artists From an internationally successful woman to Drers great Dutch rival, the country has so much to offer art fans.

Without this, put simply, Rembrandts portrait would not have anything like the prestige that they do, and portraiture leading right up to Lucian Freud would have taken a very different path indeed. Using the camera obscura that became available in the Netherlands in the mid-17th century, Vermeers best works generally feature windows, and Vermeer would use his new tool to depict the light shining through them in ways never before seen in his time. In a new era of surging nationalism, Holland was too small to maintain its dominant position. Saints and Heroes: Dutch Painting The Dutch rounded out their diet with the plentiful fish, butter, cheese, fresh fruits and vegetables that were produced domestically. Those years also ushered in the Golden Age of art, with the first paintings from the easels of Frans Hals, Hercules Seghers and Hendrick Avercamp. Possessing the strongest merchant marine of any European nation during the seventeenth century, the Netherlands had access to foodstuffs from around the world.

The story of that bitter conflict has a place in any account of Jan Vermeer's career. The average burgher was newly rich and perhaps more inclined to business than to esthetics, but he was probably aware of the Lowlands' old artistic traditions. Thus during the entire seventeenth century, the Netherlands was governed by a mercantile upper middle class, a business oligarchy of some 10,000 families. As part of the movement called Utrecht Caravaggism, Terbrugghen brought light and shadow interplay, darkness and illumination to Dutch canvases everywhere. One Frenchman wrote: "Dutch women pride themselves on the cleanliness of their house and furniture to an unbelievable degree. 2939. and Artisans in Delft: A Socio- City in Japan Under Siege by Marauding Monkeys, Unraveling the Secrets of Don McLean's 'American Pie', Three Climbers Reported Dead at Glacier National Park. A number of accomplished painters had to earn their living by other means."1.

Lawrence Otto Goedde, Tempest

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.

Marit Westermann, Rembrandt, London: Phaidon Press, 2000. In an age where paintings were only available to a rich clientele, Leydens engravings of his paintings were a crucial way for the the emerging Dutch style to become known to a continent-wide audience.

Rembrandt's Paintings, http://www.albanyinstitute.org/resources/archive/dutch/dutch.foodways.htm. and Fancy: Dress and Meaning in Before the month-long holocaust was over, vast treasures of medieval art had been destroyed. The development of the genre from antiquity to the present day: how did religion and the invention of oil painting contribute to the development of the genre in Europe, and why was the Hudson River so important?

The Dutch people have always been particularly attached to the household. On another June 5 at 10 o'clock in the morning precisely 80 years earlier, the war had begun, to all intents and purposes, with the execution of two of Holland's first revolutionaries. Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century.

cat., National Gallery

He was only the fourth captain in history to sail around the world (after one Portuguese and two Englishmen). Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Among the many factors that could be cited, we should mention first of all the vitality of a pictorial tradition that went back to the beginning of the fifteenth century, the golden age of the duchy of Burgundy, andthanks to the wealth of the cities of the Netherlands and the level of professional expertise demanded by the Burgundian courtthat was already included by right among the great artistic schools of Europe. Then, before a mute crowd in Brussels, they were beheaded, and the people pushed past the Spanish soldiers to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood of the first martyrs of the long war.

The famous diarist John Evelyn was at the Rotterdam fair in the following year, and he wrote that even farmers' houses were full of paintings. Per the National Gallery of Art (NGA), the Golden Age of Dutch Painting was one of the most extraordinary phenomena in the history of the visual arts. The Netherlands was a relatively new political player during the 17th century, recovering from what the NGA calls an arduous war against Spain. But the countrys growth into an economic powerhouse fueled a rise in the wealthy merchant class, creating a base of patrons who supported a thriving community of painters and print makers tasked with producing still lifes, portraits and quotidian scenes. (On the other side of the globe, in the West Indies, Dutch seamen also sometimes found ready-made profits: after Admiral Piet Hein's capture of a $50 million Spanish silver fleet in 1628, the West India Company paid a 75 per cent dividend.). Marit Westermann, A Worldly Art: The Dutch Republic, 15851718, New York and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Interpretation, University Park PA,

of Ireland, Dublin, London, 2003. But while Flemish masters such as Rubens and Van Dyke continued brilliantly into the seventeenth Century in the traditional vein of European art, the Dutch school moved on its own way toward an ever-more-searching realism, and established itself as a separate stream. 16001720, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. A number of these early selfies, reflective of how women artists of the era saw themselves, are on view in the NMWA show. However, celebratory feasts were a phenomenon of Golden Age Dutch culture, and most Netherlanders indulged in excess at least a few times a year. The level expanses of the Netherlands were crossed by a network of canals that had been dug to regulate the flow of water, but at the same time were extraordinarily effective means of transportation, faster and more practical than any way on land.

Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.et al. Their fight, they stated repeatedly, was not against the Crown but against the tyranny and injustices perpetrated by the representatives of that Crown.

The first effect of Philip's harsh policies, enforced by the Duchess of Parma, was to arouse the Lowlands' Protestants, already inflamed by the anti-Papist preaching of the Calvinists.

Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. et al., Still Lifes of the Golden Age: Northern European He established a court called the "Council of Troubles" to try Netherlanders for heresy and sedition (Dutchmen called it the "Council of Blood"), and it was this court of injustice that sent the Counts of Egmont and Hoorn to their deaths.

For example, newborn children were often welcomed with a kindermaal celebration and its requisite round of sweet kandeel; the feast of Saint Nicholas, New Year's Day, and Twelfth Night were similarly recognized with specialty foods. From the pictorial record left by this artistic outburst, as well as tram accounts of contemporary writers, a clear image emerges of what life was like far the country's middle classes amidst all the fighting, trading and speculating. Although we can only verify a painting career that lasted less than a decade, this was a crucial decade for the development of Dutch painting, with Caravaggio as a direct ancestor. Albert Blankert et al.

Today, the large churches in Dutch towns still welcome the faithful with bare whitewashed plastered walls, with plain, stark spaces, where there is no indulgence in decoration.

In all countries the middle classes were strong believers in simple virtues, in the family and the home, but there was an important difference in Holland: there the middle class set the tone for the whole country. Highlighting female artists contributions not as muses, but as creators in their own right, is a crucial turning point in righting art historical records, NMWA Director Susan Fisher Sterling says in a statement.

and Shipwreck in Dutch and Flemish

To any man who would murder William, the ban offered forgiveness for all crimes, a patent of nobility from the Spanish crown, and 25,000 gold crowns.

Century, Masters of Painting in the Seventeenth Century, Artists By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Netherlands could boast five universities with such fine international reputations that more than half their students came from abroad.

in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-

The prosperity enjoyed by Holland's middle classes did not extend to everyone. There were few visible class distinctions among these men and their houses reflected their simple tastes. The mantelpiece might be decorated, and the walls of the best room might have wainscoting, but the rest of the rooms were whitewashed. Thematic Evolution, New Haven Pillars such as.

We make it easy to collect and publish everything about art, manage collections, and buy, sell and promote artworks. The artists, now completely reliant on the private citizen's patronage, responded to his demands with an energy and genius that more than matched the vigor and imagination of the merchants themselves. The World of Vermeer: 16321675 Books about the new voyages and adventures in far countries were also sold in astounding numbers. In the last analysis, that also explains the dissemination on an international scale of seventeenthcentury Dutch works andunlike, for example, fourteenth and fifteenthcentury Italian workstheir presence in almost every museum collection in the world.

Painting from the Heinz Family Collection, exh. Not for nothing does the phrase Jan Steen household remain in Dutch, signifying a household both full of life and full of mess. as yf heven and erth had gone together, with fallyng of images and fallyng down of costly works."

Even his churches were stark and whitewashed, with only the organ for artistic embellishment. In 1597 the first three Dutch ships to make the round-trip voyage returned to Amsterdam, of the crew of 249 men only 89 had survived. In addition to the fervor inspired by the challenge of war, there was the effect of the new religion; many historians have suggested a strong correlation between the advent of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. in the Age of Rembrandt, Paragons of Virtue: At that time Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, abdicated; he left Spain and the 17 provinces of the Low Countries to his son, Philip Il. dutch history kitchen 1650 cooking brekelenkam mother 17th carrots researching dining fire seated

"The diversity of Dutch seventeenth-century paintings was fostered by the fact that instead of painting to the order the wealthy and powerful, painters were (for the first time in the history of Western art) producing wares commercially.

That morning at 10 o'clock sharp the terms of the peace treaty with Spain had been read out in a sober ceremony in the Dutch Supreme Court of Justice in The Hague.

Please try again. In 1585, cartographer Lucas Wagenaef published his Mariner's Mirror, two volumes of sailing directions and charts which were immediately translated, copied and printed all over Europe.

Later in the seventeenth century, tea became a popular item in the tropical trade. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. The lack of censorship, moreover, made Holland, and especially Holland, the clearing houses for many works by refugees from England, France and Spain. There, on July 10, 1584, while William was meeting with the States-General to establish a national government, a fanatic Catholic named Balthasar Grard sneaked into the Prince's house and shot him dead. Soldiers there are in plenty, but they are shown enjoying themselves, and it is as if Hollanders had seen all the fighting and violence they could stand, and wanted no more of it in their art. In 1605 the Dutch drove the Portuguese from the Moluccas; in 1618 they established a settlement called Batavia on Java; in 1624 they founded New Amsterdam in America; by 1630 they controlled trading on the northeast coast of Brazil and by 1660 had taken over from the Portuguese on Ceylon.

Not only were they financial leaders, but they also controlled the powerful town councils that served as local governments and directed the provincial States-General that met in The Hague to haggle aver national policy. Interpretation, Dutch Jan Vermeer and his fellow artists worked in an age when almost every facet of men's lives underwent drastic changes wrought by the war and the violent events accompanying it. One region of the southern Netherlands changed hands 25 times in 11 years. 1654 Even with this new interest in luxuries, daily life for the most part remained simple.

Museum of Art, Yamaguchi, 1994. Economic Study of the Seventeenth By using our website you accept our conditions of use of cookies to track data and create content (including advertising) based on your interest.

Contemporary travelers from England, France and Italy, after noting the abundance of food and absence of beggars in Holland, often exclaimed about the immaculate appearance of the interiors. In the confusion that followed its leader's death, the cause of Dutch freedom did in fact suffer for a while, but Holland's anger over its hero's death was too intense to burn out William's son Maurice took over as commander-in-chief and the fighting went on.

The painters also ignored what had been the most important influence on their young nation: the war. Since they were to be hung in the rooms of ordinary Dutch houses, most of them were small. By 1650 Amsterdam had become the focal point not only of Holland's trade network, but also of the European Money market. We and our partners use cookies to better understand your needs, improve performance and provide you with personalised content and advertisements. Eventually the prosperity of Holland became self-defeating: its covetous neighbors were finally moved to use force to acquire some of it for themselves. cat., Newark A large number of painters produced a wide variety of subject matter including scenes from daily life known as "genre": brawls in a tavern, women busy in their domestic chores, soldiers playing cards and brothels are some of the most exploited.

He demanded of the Dutch a three-million-guilder tribute to Spain in addition to the taxes already being paid, suppression of all Protestant sects and submission to his half-sister Margaret, the Duchess of Parma, whom he had made regent of the Lowlands. Vries, eds. In European waters, by the middle of the seventeenth Century, the Dutch merchants were handling three quarters of the enormous Baltic grain trade and they virtually monopolized the Bordeaux wine trade. Even the interiors of churches are humanized.

Rembrandt's Paintings, Amsterdam: Amsterdan University Press, Moreover, as historian Simon Schama points out, those who did suffer from poverty were treated with greater dignity than they might have been. Although working in still life, considered the lowliest form of painting according to the traditional hierarchy, in our more democratic age many have called him the Vermeer of still life due to his expertise in depicting light.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self Portrait with Two Circles | Wmpearl/Wikicommons, Rembrandt van Rijn, Self Portrait with Two Circles, Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Peter Brueghel the Elder, Hunter in the Snow (Winter), Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hendrick Terbrugghen, Esau Selling His Birthright, File Upload Bot (Eloquence)/Wikicommons. One thing besides money and art that particularly concerned the Hollander was education.

cat., Rijksmuseum, Peter C. Sutton et al., Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, exh.cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art. They were so successful commercially that, at least until the foundation of municipal museums, there were very few paintings from this period in their homeland.

The martyrs Egmont and Hoorn were among these, but the most prominent was Prince William of Orange. The Dutch not only initiated new, efficient trading methods, but they also understood sooner than most some of the laws of modern capitalism involving credit, interest and investment.

By no means all the goods brought in from abroad were sent on to foreign markets. Many of them stayed in Holland, as contemporary paintings clearly testify.