Dutch Golden Age & the Dutch School
To view our Flemish and Dutch School paintings
Part of our Art Movements & Schools series. See also our Flemish Baroque page.
The Dutch Golden Age was the flowering of painting in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, when artists such as Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer worked for an open market of merchants and townspeople. Its specialized branches, portrait, landscape, still life, genre and marine, set standards Europe imitated for two centuries.
Origins: A Republic of Painters
The Dutch Golden Age is the seventeenth century of the young Protestant Republic of the Netherlands. Without a royal court or a Catholic Church to commission grand altarpieces, Dutch painters worked for an open market of merchants, guilds and prosperous households. The result was an art of unprecedented realism and intimacy: the world as it was, observed with patience and painted for the wall of a home.
The Rise (1602-1632) · The Golden Age (1632-1670s) · Afterlife (1670s onward)
The Branches of the School
No school ever specialized so completely. Dutch painting divided into distinct branches, each with its own masters and its own market: portraiture, from Rembrandt and Frans Hals to hundreds of city portraitists; landscape, with van Goyen, Ruisdael and the painters of rivers, dunes and winter ice; still life, from flower pieces to the vanitas, where a skull, a candle and a mirror remind the viewer that life is short; genre painting, the quiet interiors of Vermeer, de Hooch and their followers; and marine painting for a nation that lived by the sea. A collector today still enters the school through one of these doors.
Decline and the Long Afterlife
The French invasion of 1672 broke the market, and by 1700 the great age was over. Its manner, however, became a permanent European language. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, painters in the Netherlands and beyond continued to work in the Dutch taste: candlelit scenes, flower pieces, moral still lifes and portraits in the manner of the Golden Age masters. These later Dutch School works, honest, skilled and far more affordable than their seventeenth-century models, form one of the most rewarding fields for collectors of cabinet paintings.
The Dutch School in Our Collection
GalerieClub offers Dutch School paintings on canvas and panel, including vanitas subjects, flower still lifes and portraits in the Golden Age tradition, from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
