Dutch Golden Age & the Dutch School

Our art movements and schools →

The Dutch Golden Age was the extraordinary flowering of painting in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, when artists worked for an open market of ordinary citizens rather than for court or church. Its portraits, landscapes, still lifes and domestic interiors created the visual language of modern European painting.

The Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century was Protestant, mercantile and without a royal court. Painters therefore worked for an open market of merchants, burghers and craftsmen who bought pictures for their homes. This changed everything. Instead of altarpieces and dynastic portraits, artists specialised in the subjects their customers wanted, and produced them in volume.

Rembrandt van Rijn gave the portrait a psychological depth no one had reached before, and Johannes Vermeer turned the domestic interior into a study of light itself. Around them, whole careers were built on a single genre. Jan van Goyen and Jacob van Ruisdael in landscape, Willem Kalf and Willem Claesz Heda in still life, Jan Steen in the merry company, Paulus Potter in cattle. Genre painting, landscape and still life all became major subjects in their own right, which had never been true anywhere before.

The Year of Disaster in 1672, when France invaded the Republic, broke the art market and the great generation dispersed. But the Dutch manner had become a European language. Its subjects and its handling were imitated across the continent for two centuries. The floral still life in particular, invented in Holland, became a standard of European painting well into the nineteenth century, painted in France, Belgium and Britain in a manner that remained recognisably Dutch.

What the copying of a famous composition actually was, and what a canvas made that way is, is set out in our guide to period copies after the Old Masters.