• The war with Kingdom of spain
  • Prince William of Orange
  • Economic prosperity
  • The emergence of a new art
  • Trade
  • Prosperity
  • Self-government
  • Gimmicky life
  • Teaching and life for the lower classes
  • Decline
  • Food in the Dutch republic

helst Portrait of Abraham del Court and his Wife Maria de Keerssegieter
Bartholomeus van der Helst
1654
Boijmans-van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam

MASTERPIECES OF DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTING

by Bernd Lindemann
 Rembrandt to Vermeer. Civil Values in 17th-century Flemish and Dutch Painting
Fondazione Roma, Museo del Corso
Nov 11, 2008 to Feb fifteen, 2009

There may be no other country in which in the cursory bridge of a hundred years so many paintings were executed as during the seventeenth century in the United Provinces, in Holland, as this land is normally called abroad, or holland, to use the name it gave itself. It is estimated that between 1600 and 1700 no less than five meg paintings were executed in small and large centers of painting, a figure that is even more surprising if yous recall of the distrust of holy images professed by Calvinism from the very commencement of its spread. The moving ridge of iconoclasm information technology set in motility was then powerful that it cut off the about classic destination of the most significant artistic production. Today, the large churches in Dutch towns still welcome the faithful with bare whitewashed plastered walls, with apparently, stark spaces, where at that place is no indulgence in ornament. Inscriptions and coats of arms may sometimes grace the memorial tablets and desultory images decorate the balustrades of the galleries, merely everything else is strictly prototype less.

What made such a prolific artistic production possible and, above all, what led the United Provinces to write a fundamental chapter in the history of European art? Amongst the many factors that could exist cited, we should mention beginning of all the vitality of a pictorial tradition that went back to the beginning of the fifteenth century, the aureate historic period of the duchy of Burgundy, and—thanks to the wealth of the cities of the netherlands and the level of professional expertise demanded by the Burgundian court—that was already included by correct amongst the neat artistic schools of Europe. The northern provinces had been part of the duchy of Burgundy in the past, which was still alive in the seventeenth century. Although their commonage consciousness told them that the Spanish king against whom they rebelled had shamefully usurped the Burgundian heritage, leading information technology to ruin and abolishing their aboriginal privileges, their loyalty to the good government of the dukes of Burgundy was nevertheless intact and in their name the stadolder, who held the highest political part, were elected.

Portrait of John Evelyn

John Evelyn

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. A considerable proportion of the inhabitants of Dutch towns had more than sufficient income to provide for their fundamental needs. Many choose to spend their surplus on furnishings for their homes, including paintings. This lead to a great need for paintings, only almost exclusively paintings at low prices. Since they were to exist hung in the rooms of ordinary Dutch houses, near of them were small.

"The variety 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 fourth dimension in the history of Western art) producing wares commercially. Private buyers of unlike backgrounds and diverse tastes were receptive to pictures of all kinds of subject field matter and a wide range of styles. Big numbers of paintings were sold. Simply it seems that even larger numbers were put on auction than the marketplace could hands blot. Prices were generally low, and painters did not grow rich. The contest was so sharp that few could prosper. A number of accomplished painters had to earn their living by other ways."1

In the 2nd place, the Netherlands learned to relate to fine art is a different way from the other European countries. After the connection of art with courts, monasteries and religious associations had waned, new relations emerged. Increasingly wealthy and numerous—in Amsterdam alone, the population had grown from threescore,000 inhabitants in 1600 to 135,000 in 1640—and in step with the European nobility, the urban upper class had discovered that paintings were a symbol of power, objects to be collected avidly. On the other mitt, Holland was the Mecca of trade and consequently paintings could also become merchandise. Whereas a harsh environs and a landscape indented by wild and impassable mountains made Switzerland practically inaccessible. The level expanses of holland were crossed past a network of canals that had been dug to regulate the flow of water, only at the aforementioned time were extraordinarily effective ways of transportation, faster and more applied than whatever fashion on land. Until so, trade had been based mainly on spices, textiles and tulip bulbs, but it gradually extended to paintings as well, and that is the reason why many Dutch paintings are not very large. The fact that they were piece of cake to handle and were less bulky fabricated information technology easier to place them on the market. In the last analysis, that also explains the dissemination on an international scale of seventeenth‐century Dutch works and—unlike, for example, fourteenth‐ and fifteenth‐century Italian works—their presence in nearly every museum collection in the earth. They were so successful commercially that, at least until the foundation of municipal museums, there were very few paintings from this menses in their homeland.

Social and Historical Groundwork and General Considerations*

Later years of struggle against Spanish domination, the northern provinces won their independence in 1609. The tremendous industrial and commercial activity that followed fabricated the Netherlands ane of the most powerful nations of the earth. In the United Provinces most people lived in cities where economic prosperity was widespread and at that place existed both relatively loftier religious and social tolerance. The Dutch were exceptionally literate since reading was important in a Protestant society which maintained that the private must pursue the Bible by himself. Books were published in great numbers and institutes for college pedagogy. This economic and educational groundwork was primal for the explosive cultural growth which was to follow.

Persons in all walks of life bought paintings and hung them. Reports of this fact were written at the time for instance, by 2 oft quoted English travelers. Peter Mundy, who was in Amsterdam in 1640 commented on the honey of paintings he observed.

All in general striving to adorn their houses, especially the outer or street roome, with plush peeces, Butchers and bakers not much inferior in their shoppes, which are, Fairely sett Forth, yea many tymes blacksmithes, Cobblers, ets...will have some picture or another by their Forge and in their stalle.

The nearly distinguishing characteristic of Dutch art is probably the close scrutiny of the natural world. The elevated, mystical or supernatural aspects were largely ignored. The concern with the space qualities of low-cal seems to be a common thread linking almost every Dutch painter. Along with this characteristic another outstanding aspect of Dutch art is the domestic scene in an interior setting. The Dutch people have always been peculiarly attached to the household. Dutch painters take monumentalized information technology in their art, the most apprehensive household of the poor and the almost elegant dwellings of the well-to-do were both treated with respect and human participation and sometimes with warm humor. Even the interiors of churches are humanized. A large number of painters produced a wide variety of subject matter including scenes from daily life known equally "genre": brawls in a tavern, women busy in their domestic chores, soldiers playing cards and brothels are some of the most exploited. Landscape, portraiture and all the same life, which had existed for centuries, were re-examined in a fresh light and brought to hitherto unprecedented levels of naturalness. Earthly humor, often with satirical overtones, was another specialty of Dutch art. In the painting of Vermeer in particular, nosotros can see the fundamental characteristics of Dutch painting, beloved of light and the common man experience of everyday life, brought to their highest levels of artistic expression.

* Madlyn Miller Kahr, Dutch Painting in the Seventeenth Century, New York: Routledge, 1992

Hans Koningsberger
The Globe of Vermeer: 1632–1675
New York, 1967, pp. 29–39

The War for Independence with Espana

On the evening of June 5, 1648, fireworks and bonfires in all the towns of the United Provinces historic victory for the Dutch in the state of war of independence. That morning at 10 o'clock sharp the terms of the peace treaty with Espana had been read out in a sober ceremony in the Dutch Supreme Court of Justice in The Hague.

The ceremony was planned with a dramatic sense of timing. On another June 5 at 10 o'clock in the morning precisely 80 years before, the state of war had begun, to all intents and purposes, with the execution of two of Holland'southward beginning revolutionaries. 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.

Instead of negotiating with them, the King's representative in the netherlands had taken them prisoner. 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 story of that bitter disharmonize has a place in any account of January Vermeer'southward career. It was still going on when Vermeer was born (as information technology had been when his male parent and probably his grandfather were born); more important, it shaped the character of the whole Dutch nation, and had a straight effect on the development of seventeenth Century Dutch art.

Jan Vermeer and his fellow artists worked in an historic period when almost every facet of men's lives underwent drastic changes wrought past the war and the trigger-happy events accompanying it. Holland emerged from these upheavals as an aggressive, Protestant republic with a capitalistic economy and a conservative gild. These cultural conditions produced a climate in which artists all of a sudden flourished like flowers in a hothouse. It was almost every bit if the state of war had brought together all the ingredients necessary for the spontaneous generation of an artistic flame.

The rebellion that flared later the Counts of Egmont and Hoorn were executed in 1568 had actually started brewing more a decade earlier. At that time Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, abdicated; he left Kingdom of spain and the 17 provinces of the Low Countries to his son, Philip Il. The people of the Lowlands were accustomed plenty to outside rule their land had been subjected to strange intervention since the Middle Ages. They had no quarrel with Charles V, who in the start place was one of them, having been built-in in Ghent, and who had allowed them a loftier degree of autonomy in conducting their own diplomacy.

But Philip was a unlike sort of homo. Morose, dictatorial, fanatically Catholic, the new King hated the due north, and cared for nothing just Espana and his religion. In August 1559, he paid a brief visit to the Lowlands and coldly addressed the territory's notables, the members of the parliamentary States-Full general. 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. Philip and then bade a hostile cheerio to us-General and prepare sail for Espana, which he never left again.

The first effect of Philip's harsh policies, enforced past the Duchess of Parma, was to arouse the Lowlands' Protestants, already inflamed by the anti-Papist preaching of the Calvinists. A wave of religious rebellion swept the country. Crowds attacked Catholic churches with Reformation zeal, threw down statues, and burned and smashed everything connected with the hated priesthood. Ane English observer said of such a riot that it "looked like hell where were above one,000 torches brandying and syche a noise! as yf heven and erth had gone together, with fallyng of images and fallyng downwards of costly works." Before the month-long holocaust was over, vast treasures of medieval art had been destroyed.

The Spanish respond was brutal and ruthless. In 1567, Philip sent the Duke of Alva and x,000 troops north to replace the Duchess of Parma, and the years of the "Spanish Fury" followed. Boondocks afterward town in the Lowlands was besieged, taken and ravaged. Alva executed his mission with a zeal that made him, and by extension all Spaniards, hateful to every Dutchman. He established a court called the "Quango of Troubles" to try Netherlanders for heresy and sedition (Dutchmen chosen it the "Quango of Claret"), and it was this court of injustice that sent the Counts of Egmont and Hoorn to their deaths. By 1568 groups of 30, 40 and 50 people at a time were beingness condemned to dice; their property was confiscated by the Crown.

Prince William of Orange

At this point the young nobility of the Lowlands began to take up arms against the oppressor. Later, the resistance to Spain became a autonomous—or rather, a bourgeois-revolution; at start, even so, it was led past princes and counts. The martyrs Egmont and Hoorn were among these, but the nearly prominent was Prince William of Orange. William's role is comparable to that played by George Washington 200 years later in the American Colonies: he was by every measure the male parent of the new republic. He quickly, became the center of resistance in the fight, its vocalisation, its general. He found the money and the troops. William was only 26 when Male monarch Philip left for Spain, but was already widely known as a brilliant diplomat and a man of culture as well equally a dashing ladies' man. He was heir to the rich possessions of the family unit of Nassau in Germany.

When Philip took over his followers took neat pains to protestation their continued loyalty to their overlord. Their fight, they stated repeatedly, was non confronting the Crown but against the tyranny and injustices perpetrated by the representatives of that Crown. (The Dutch national canticle stems from those days, and still contains a line in which William says, "I take always honored the King of Spain.") Nonetheless, Alva'due south harshness and the King' s refusal to compromise slowly pushed William toward an ever-more than-farthermost position. 1 is again reminded of the course of events leading to the American Revolution.

The first turning point in the state of war came in 1574, when the Spanish siege of Leiden was broken by Dutch seagoing guerrilla fighters called Sea Beggars. These were rough and ready mariners who banded into a semi military machine organization to bedevil the Spaniards wherever they could. Frequently they were more pirates than guerrillas, harassing peaceful shipping for their ain benefit, and even occasionally raiding English coastal towns. William disapproved of their unsavory tactics and only reluctantly recognized them as function of his forces. They were, notwithstanding, an effective weapon in the fight against Spain.

That the Ocean Beggars were able to sail upward to Leiden to lift the siege is a dramatic indication of the spirit in which the Dutch fought their rebellion. Leiden is not a port. Normally it is several miles from the ocean. Simply in their dogged defence against the troops of the Duke of Alva, the people of Leiden had opened the dikes and flooded their state to hinder the foe, the Body of water Beggars actually sailed in over the fields when they went to Leiden's rescue. Thousands of acres of farm state were spoiled by the flooding, but time and over again during the war the Dutch made similar sacrifices such as burning their own crops to assist the fight confronting the hated Spaniard.

Five years after the successful defense force of Leiden, eight of the northern provinces-Utrecht, Holland, Zeeland, Guelderland, Overijssel, Friesland, Groaning and Drenthe-signed a treaty called the Union of Utrecht. At the get-go of the war, each Dutch province had fought on its ain under the loose control of William of Orange. Now these eight provinces were bound in a "firm union" for the common defense. Ii years later on they took the terminal step of rebellion: they abjured the King of Kingdom of spain as their legal lord. The States Full general met in 1581 to draw upward a document in justification of their moral right to deed:

As it is apparent to all that a prince is constituted past God to be ruler of the people, and whereas God did not create the people slaves to their prince, to obey his commands, whether correct or wrong; simply rather the prince for the sake of the subjects ...[and then] when he does not behave thus, simply, on the contrary, oppresses them ...they may not simply disallow his authorisation, but legally keep to the choice of another prince for their defense.

The other prince they were turning to was William of Orange, and to King Philip information technology at present seemed that this man was the sole cause of his troubles. 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. So he issued an infamous "ban" which described William as "principal disturber of all Christendom and specially these Netherlands." To any homo who would murder William, the ban offered forgiveness for all crimes, a patent of nobility from the Castilian crown, and 25,000 golden crowns.

Prince William'due south court was in Delft, which, being strategically located and easily defendable, was a stronghold of the revolutionary cause. (At this time there was no hint of the fame Delft would earn as an art middle 50 years later.) In that location, on July 10, 1584, while William was meeting with u.s.-General to found a national regime, a fanatic Cosmic named Balthasar Gérard sneaked into the Prince'south house and shot him expressionless. Gérard, who had spent ii 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. In the defoliation that followed its leader'due south death, the cause of Dutch freedom did in fact endure for a while, but The netherlands's anger over its hero'due south decease was too intense to burn down out William's son Maurice took over equally commander-in-chief and the fighting went on. More towns were captured and recaptured; soldiers killed and were killed; peasants saw their houses and harvests burned time and once more. One region of the southern Netherlands changed easily 25 times in xi years.

Actually, though the men of the fourth dimension could not perceive information technology, the state of war had already been decided at the time of William's expiry. No assassination, no siege, no battle could undo the inexorable shift of the war in favor of Holland. For the Dutch revolution was, of class, not the brainchild of i man or his family. The Renaissance and the Reformation had swept aside the circumstances in which nations and populations could be passed around and inherited like so much real estate. At that place was no longer any bond strong enough to keep the people of Amsterdam in one empire with the monarch in Madrid.

At terminal, in 1600, the trend of battle became clear when the Dutch won a decisive victory at the Battle of Nieuwpoort. Though terminal peace would not be achieved for nigh 40 years, a temporary truce was signed in 1609, and Holland was never once more threatened by the Spanish armies. For all applied purposes, the United Provinces were free to develop every bit an independent nation from the first years of the century.

The Emergence of a New Art

Those years also ushered in the Golden Historic period of art, with the beginning paintings from the easels of Frans Hals, Hercules Seghers and Hendrick Avercamp. In fact, and then closely did the nascency of the new school of painting coincide with the birth of the nation that a French fine art historian has remarked that it was as if "the correct to having a free and national school of painting had been part of the stipulations of the treaty of 1609."

This new school of painting was actually a co-operative of the Flemish art that in earlier centuries had produced such masters as the Van Eycks, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel. But while Flemish masters such every bit 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 divide stream.

The evolution of these two schools of painting was clearly related to the political developments of the war. When the viii northern provinces formed their "firm union," they created a permanent segmentation within the Lowlands, drawing a boundary that has stayed much the aforementioned to the present day. The southern provinces that did not join the union comprising modern Belgium—were neither able nor particularly anxious to break their bonds with Catholic Spain. The social system in the south was still feudal, dominated by an elite that was largely French-speaking and not nationally oriented. What Protestants there were in: the south fled north many of these were businessmen from Antwerp, and their loss devitalized the southern provinces equally much as did the connected Spanish occupation there. Information technology would be two centuries before Kingdom of belgium emerged equally a stable, independent nation.

Trade

The northern region, which came to be known as Kingdom of the netherlands later its biggest most prosperous province, flourished. The war had not simply set the boundaries of the new nation (as an 18th Century chronicler put information technology, "Mars had stood over the birth as midwife") but information technology had besides inverse its spirit. Nearly of the one-time liberal men of noble nascency had died during the state of war, the new leaders were merchants and Protestants. The aggressiveness, the national pride and hatred of Spain that had been stirred upwardly by the state of war were now employed in developing the strong, mercantile economic system that such a small nation needed to survive among its big neighbors.

With nigh a crusading spirit the Dutch began pushing Holland to greatness, and their weapon was merchandise. Trading was nada new for Kingdom of the netherlands. In the 14th Century, Dutch ships had begun carrying grain and timber from the Baltic Sea ports to Western Europe and the Iberian Peninsula. On the render trip north they carried spices and other valuable goods brought from the East Indies by Portuguese ships. But then Philip Il airtight down all Portuguese and Spanish ports to Dutch ships, and the merchants of The netherlands were forced to sail to the East themselves and trade in that location direct. In 1597 the first iii Dutch ships to make the round-trip voyage returned to Amsterdam, of the crew of 249 men only 89 had survived. Nevertheless, the following year 22 more ships left for the Far East, and from then on the number increased steadily and rapidly. In 1600, the starting time Dutch ship reached Nippon, and presently the Dutch were the only Europeans allowed to trade at that place. In 1601, Oliver van Noort, former pirate and Rotterdam innkeeper, sailed west through the Strait of Magellan to the Moluccas, due south of the Philippines, and home around Africa.

He was only the quaternary captain in history to sail effectually the world (afterward one Portuguese and two Englishmen).

Information technology was always trade, rather than colonizing, that provided the prime motivation far Dutch expansion, yet a colonial empire emerged in the process. The mariners built strong points on afar shores to protect their ships and stores tram natives or marauding European ships; the stiff points became forts, the forts led to further conquests. In 1605 the Dutch drove the Portuguese from the Moluccas; in 1618 they established a settlement chosen 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.

In European waters, by the middle of the seventeenth Century, the Dutch merchants were treatment three quarters of the enormous Baltic grain trade and they virtually monopolized the Bordeaux wine trade. Fifty-fifty Spain relied and then heavily on the cargoes carried by Dutch ships that the embargo on them in Castilian ports was relaxed. Dutch vessels had become the freight carriers of Europe.

The highest rewards carne tram the merchandise in spices, the most coveted production of the East Indies. Spices such as black pepper, cloves and cinnamon helped preserve and make palatable the dreary food of an historic period whose just other means of food preservation were pickling and salting. The lure of spices became every bit strong as the lure of gilt; in the greedy struggle far East Indian resource in such places equally Batavia and Ceylon, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and eventually English traders killed one some other and whatsoever of the local population who stood in their way. Rather than see prices go down or leave something for a competitor, they burned downwards plantations, deported entire villages and turned the natives into virtual slaves.

All this was strictly a business operation. For or example, in 1644 the Lath of the Dutch East India Visitor stated that their holdings in the Far E were non Dutch conquests but "the belongings of private merchants, who were entitled to sell those places to whomever they pleased, even if it were to the King of Spain." These policies paid enormous dividends to the investors in the trade. One venture in 1599 made a 400 per cent profit, and from 1630 on, annual dividends of 30 per cent and more than became normal for investors in the East India Visitor. (On the other side of the globe, in the West Indies, Dutch seamen also sometimes establish ready-made profits: after Admiral Piet Hein's capture of a $l 1000000 Spanish argent fleet in 1628, the West India Company paid a 75 per cent dividend.)

Later in the seventeenth century, tea became a pop item in the tropical trade. The same Doctor Tulp whom Rembrandt had immortalized in his Anatomy of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp started a great fad for tea past prescribing it for all ills; he is said to have made his patients drink l cups of tea a 24-hour interval. A colleague wrote a little book, subsidized by the East Republic of india Company, extolling tea'due south virtues-possibly the first-known example of the "Doctors recommend. ..." technique of advertising.

Another popular Far Eastern product was porcelain. In the get-go half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch imported and shipped on to the residual of Europe more than three million pieces of Chinese porcelain. The interest in porcelain led to the creation of the famous Delft Blue pottery industry, which nevertheless thrives. By 1700 Delft Blueish pottery makers had become so proficient that they were exporting pieces of mixed Oriental and Dutch design back to Japan.

By no means all the goods brought in from away were sent on to foreign markets. Many of them stayed in Holland, as contemporary paintings clearly testify. Tobacco was as popular and then every bit now-information technology was first brought from the Due west Indies and the Americas in the 1500s-and the unsavory dens where the common human enjoyed his smoke made a favorite subject area for such genre painters every bit Adriaen Brouwer and Adriaen van Ostade. Other products, faithfully recorded in the art of the day, added a cosmopolitan touch of luxury to the homes of the merchants who had gambled fortunes to import them: besides porcelain there were fine silk and\ satin fabrics, rare forest, and Turkish carpets (used every bit rugs, wall hangings or tablecloths). All of these appeared as props in hundreds of paintings of interior scenes, peculiarly those of January Vermeer.

Prosperity

Most of these goods had come up into Holland through the port of Amsterdam, whose importance as a commercial middle grew prodigiously. Its Commercial Exchange, established in 1585 subsequently the Spanish captured the trading heart of Antwerp, prospered enormously and occupied one of the most first-class buildings in the urban center. Amsterdam'due south Banking company of Exchange, founded in 1609, ready up a credit system, a stable rate of substitution and an efficient organisation of checking accounts. By 1650 Amsterdam had become the focal point non only of Holland's trade network, but too of the European Money market.

Many elements contributed to The netherlands's sudden upsurge. In addition to the fervor inspired by the challenge of war, there was the issue of the new faith; many historians have suggested a stiff correlation betwixt the appearance of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. Although the not bad merchants of Holland were not the about agog Calvinists ("They prefer gain to Godliness," complained the staunch English Protestant, Oliver Cromwell), their new organized religion, past glorifying hard work, thrift and sobriety, and past emphasizing the value of labor and the mutual man, provided the correct psychological climate for a capitalistic economy. Another vital factor in Holland's remarkable growth was its position on the very edge of the continent, where it served as a natural gateway to Europe.

Lastly, Kingdom of the netherlands's wealth was created partly past the default of its neighbors. These countries were amazed and bellyaching by The netherlands's success and consoled themselves past thinking information technology could non concluding long. The truth was that these nations, land wealthy but economically backward, were still bound past the fetters of feudalism and ancient financial practices. The Dutch non only initiated new, efficient trading methods, but they also understood sooner than almost some of the laws of mod commercialism involving credit, interest and investment.

Cocky-Government

The men who profited nigh from this knowledge, and who became the key figures in all aspects of Dutch society, were the merchants of the nation's great cities-Amsterdam, The Hague, Utrecht, Delft and Haarlem. Non just 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. Since the Middle Ages, the town councils had been made up of the "most wise and rich" citizens: at present, with trade the lifeblood of the land, the "most wise and rich" but meant the most successful merchants. Thus during the entire seventeenth century, the Netherlands was governed past a mercantile upper middle class, a business organisation oligarchy of some 10,000 families.

But equally surely as they guided Kingdom of the netherlands'southward politics and economics, these prosperous merchants were likewise instrumental in the evolution of Dutch art. The average burgher was newly rich and possibly more inclined to business than to esthetics, simply he was probably aware of the Lowlands' sometime artistic traditions. He had plain tastes, but was fond of material things, and had the money to indulge his pleasure. Paintings were an ideal investment: not only were they decorative (and undoubtedly helpful to his image every bit a man of substance); they were also portable and to some extent negotiable, an of import consideration to a human of speculative interests and fluctuating income.

As a firm Protestant, the average burgher had no involvement in traditional ornate religious art. Even his churches were stark and whitewashed, with only the organ for artistic embellishment. Every bit a sturdy bourgeois he wanted no part of the elaborate architecture and decor favored past the nobility of other countries. What he did want was a familiar landscape, a simple scene of everyday life or, best of all, a portrait of himself in his new nobility as a free citizen, with his family, his colleagues, or doing good works for some charitable group. He was proud of his house and of his way of life, and it made perfect sense to decorate the 1 with pictures of the other.

The artists, now completely reliant on the individual denizen'due south patronage, responded to his demands with an free energy and genius that more than matched the vigor and imagination of the merchants themselves. The outcome was not merely a vivid portrait of a nation and a time but a brilliant chapter in fine art history besides. From the pictorial record left by this artistic outburst, as well every bit tram accounts of gimmicky writers, a articulate image emerges of what life was like far the land's center classes among all the fighting, trading and speculating. After 1600, there was very little left of the aristocratic fashion of life in the United Provinces. The new republican society had shun itself of its worldly and ecclesiastic princes. The House of Orange maintained a small-scale court at The Hague which boasted a coterie of elegant, French-speaking, dueling gallants; simply the general tenor of life was gear up past the merchants. There were few visible class distinctions among these men and their houses reflected their simple tastes. Ostentation went against the grain-because they were Protestants, considering they had merely emerged tram the austerity of the war and because their business organization ventures by their very nature were highly speculative—and a man'due south house, like the things in it, was an investment that he might have to dispose of at whatever moment. So the article of furniture of a middle-class firm at the beginning of the century was not very different from what would have been found in the tardily Eye Ages: a few tables, cupboards, a linen closet, several apse beds built into the walls, a desk-bound. The mantelpiece might be decorated, and the walls of the best room might have wainscoting, but the rest of the rooms were whitewashed.

Gimmicky Life

Above all, the house was make clean. Contemporary travelers from England, France and Italy, after noting the abundance of food and absence of beggars in Holland, often exclaimed nigh the immaculate appearance of the interiors. One Frenchman wrote: "Dutch women pride themselves on the cleanliness of their house and piece of furniture to an unbelievable degree. They never seem to cease washing and scrubbing all the wooden furniture and fittings." Another visitor added, "They would prefer to die of hunger surrounded past their shining cauldrons and sparkling crockery rather than prepare whatsoever dish that might perchance disarrange this perfect symmetry"- an observation that seems not quite so far-fetched after a report of the spotless kitchens portrayed in so many seventeenth-century canvases.

Later, as Holland prospered, some domestic luxuries began to announced equally evidence of accumulated wealth-a change recorded in the paintings of the last half of the century. Gradually the ornament became more refined equally walls were covered with tapestry or gilded leather. Now carne the satins, rugs and porcelains; oak gave way to fine Oriental forest; tea tables, mosaics, marble, bronze and crystal artifacts were imported to grace the more elaborate houses.

Even with this new involvement in luxuries, daily life for the most part remained unproblematic. Beer was the primary drinkable for the well-to-practise merchant'southward family, and his house had far fewer servants' rooms than a comparable establishment in France or England; the richest might employ ane valet plus two maids for heavy household work. In all countries the centre classes were strong believers in unproblematic virtues, in the family and the dwelling house, but there was an of import deviation in Kingdom of the netherlands: in that location the middle class set the tone for the whole land.

Education and Life for the Lower Classes

One thing besides money and art that specially concerned the Hollander was instruction. As early equally the sixteenth century, Erasmus had commented on the unusually loftier number of educated people in Holland, and in the mid-1600s the Portuguese emissary in The Hague reported with considerable exaggeration that "at that place is not a cobbler here who does not add French and Latin to his own language." By the center of the seventeenth century, the Netherlands could boast five universities with such fine international reputations that more than half their students came from abroad.

The high level of literacy led to a flourishing press trade in Dutch- language books. 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 most every own household-by 1665 an illustrated collection of Cast'southward works had sold fifty,000 copies. Books about the new voyages and adventures in far countries were as well sold in astounding numbers. The lack of censorship, moreover, made Kingdom of the netherlands, and especially Holland, the clearing houses for many works by refugees from England, France and Spain. 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. (In the English linguistic communication such books are notwithstanding called "Waggoners" past old-fashioned skippers.) 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. For citizens ashore, it became fashionable to hang beautifully illustrated navigational charts on the walls of their houses as decoration-a style that is reflected in many contemporary paintings, every bit in Vermeer's Officer and Laughing Girl.

Truthful every bit seventeenth-century Dutch fine art was in mirroring it: historic period, there were a few aspects of gimmicky lire that were largely ignored by the painters. One was poverty. The prosperity enjoyed by Holland's heart classes did not extend to everyone. Much less wealth seeped down to the lowest classes than is often assumed from the swell streets and well-ordered households that appear in and so many of the era'due south paintings. The workhouse, the poorhouse, slum living and child labor were all evident. A laborer worked 14 hours or more than a day far a few pennies; an able seaman, who ran a fifty–-50 adventure of not coming back from an Indies voyage, made ii or 3 guilders a week, the equivalent of a weekly salary of virtually $10 today. Even though the Netherlands' standard of living compared favorably with that of any neighboring country, recent research shows that the Aureate Age was far from golden far perhaps half the population.

The painters likewise ignored what had been the nigh important influence on their young nation: the state of war. Holland had spent decades fighting a bloody struggle, and even so there is practically no record of it in paintings except far a few sea battles and siege scenes. Soldiers in that location 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 up, and wanted no more than of information technology in their art.

Economic Decline

Furthermore, even when there was no fighting going on, the seventeenth century was a time of rapidly changing fortunes and turbulent political crises-and yet little of this turmoil appears in the art. Most of the paintings bandage an aura of calm well-being, an illusion that may well take represented the Dutchman's longing for a security and tranquility he had never actually known. Though they await so solid in their pictures, the successful Dutch burghers must at times take had anxious moments when they wondered how they had come up such a long way in and so short a time, and whether it could last.

Equally a affair of fact, it did not. Eventually the prosperity of Holland became cocky-defeating: its covetous neighbors were finally moved to use strength to acquire some of it for themselves. Toward the stop of the historic period, the English wrested control of the seas from the Dutch Navy and in 1672 French troops overran almost of the northern provinces. In a new era of surging nationalism, Holland was too small to maintain its ascendant position. The merchants lost their daring; prosperity induced languor; godliness became self-righteousness. A long flow of stagnation followed far Holland, and its art languished forth with it.

Merely during most of the seventeenth century, these tendencies had not still come to the surface. That was the age that belonged to the men who had fought for and won their freedom: hard men, sober but given to sudden gambles; religious, proud and vain-the men who look at us from the portraits for which they posed with such obvious pride.

Food in the Dutch republic one

Possessing the strongest merchant marine of any European nation during the seventeenth century, holland had admission to foodstuffs from effectually the world. Wine was imported from France, Italy and Spain, and beer from Germany. Bharat and the Spice Islands supplied spices, while the Mediterranean made a fine source of raisins, dates, figs and nuts, and Poland and Prussia provided earth-shaking cereal grains. The Dutch rounded out their nutrition with the plentiful fish, butter, cheese, fresh fruits and vegetables that were produced domestically.

In add-on to providing Netherlanders with a plentiful and varied selection of foodstuffs during the Golden Age, the rich trade economy was too largely responsible for the nation'southward notable prosperity during this period. While not all Golden Historic period Netherlanders lived the loftier-life of the wealthy burgerlijk and regent classes, the Dutch mostly enjoyed a higher standard of living than their counterparts throughout the remainder of early modernistic Europe, and nutrient historian and co-curator of the exhibition, Peter G. Rose, identifies them as "the best fed population in Europe" during this menses. Moreover, as historian Simon Schama points out, those who did suffer from poverty were treated with greater dignity than they might take been. He writes: [The netherlands] was not a dietary democracy, much less a culinary utopia. But it was at least a order in which the "unfortunate" poor (as distinct from athletic vagrants) were supplied with fare meant to gauge to the diet of the more than fortunate rather than stigmatize their wretchedness with a regimen of didactic meanness.

In the face of such abundance, seventeenth-century Netherlanders generally sought moderation in their everyday eating habits. Yet, celebratory feasts were a phenomenon of Golden Age Dutch culture, and most Netherlanders indulged in excess at to the lowest degree a few times a year. 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 24-hour interval, and Twelfth Night were similarly recognized with specialty foods. Lesser events—including a child's beginning schoolhouse or apprenticeship, the purchase of a new house, or a loved ane'south departure on a long journey or his render home—were as well acknowledged with feasts. Many Dutch burghers even celebrated jokmaalen, a feast of inversion during which masters and mistresses waited on their servants.

Essential Reading

Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century , Chicago: Universtiy of Chicago Press, 1983.

Albert Blankert et al. Gods, Saints and Heroes: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1980.

Wayne Franits, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Printing, 1993.

Wayne Franits, Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution, New Haven and London: Yale Universtiy Press, 2004.

Freedberg David and Jan de Vries, eds. Art in History/History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth- Century Dutch Culture, Santa Monica: The Getty Center For The History of Art, 1991.

Lawrence Otto Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck in Dutch and Flemish Art: Convention, Rhetoric, and Interpretation, Academy Park PA, and London: Penn State Universtiy Press, 1989.

Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Ascent, Greatness, and Autumn, 1477–1806, Oxford: Clarendon Printing, 1995.

Eddy de Jongh et al. Faces of the Golden Historic period: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Portraits, exh. true cat., Prefectural Museum of Art, Yamaguchi, 1994.

Madlyn Millner Kahr, Dutch Painting in the Seventeenth Century, New York: Westview Press, 1978.

John Michael Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio- Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century. Princeton: Princeton Academy Press, 1982.

Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Gold Historic period, New York: Vintage, 1987.

Peter C. Sutton, Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Painting. exh. true cat., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1987.

Peter C. Sutton et al. Love Letters: Dutch Genre Paintings in the Age of Vermeer, exh. true cat., National Gallery of Republic of ireland, Dublin, London, 2003.

Peter C. Sutton et al., Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, exh.cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia, 1984.

Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 1600–1720, New Oasis: Yale University Printing, 1995.

Mariët Westermann, Art and Home: Dutch Interiors in the Historic period of Rembrandt, exh. cat., Newark Museum of Art, Denver, 2001.

Mariët Westermann, Rembrandt, London: Phaidon Printing, 2000.

Mariët Westermann, A Worldly Art: The Dutch Democracy, 1585–1718, New York and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Arthur Chiliad. Wheelock Jr., Vermeer and the Art of Painting, New York and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Arthur Yard. Wheelock Jr.et al. A Moral Compass: Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Painting in the netherlands, exh. cat., Grand Rapids Art Museum. Thousand Rapids, 1999.

Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. et al., However Lifes of the Golden Age: Northern European Painting from the Heinz Family unit Drove, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art. Washington, 1989.

Marieke de Winkel, Fashion and Fancy: Dress and Meaning in Rembrandt'south Paintings, Amsterdam: Amsterdan University Press, 2006.