A Golden Age?
Rethinking 17th-century
Dutch painting

Genres

The topic of genres in Dutch seventeenth-century painting has similarly reached an impasse. We intend to give a new impulse to this important research subject by placing historical analysis at the heart of our reflection. The weight of socio-economical methods and the persisting predominance of nineteenth-century constructions (the ‘small genres’, the ‘small masters’, ‘realism, ‘popular art’, ‘protestant art’, etc.) have caused a disproportionate emphasis on subjects that are thought to be characteristic for Dutch paintings, like scenes of everyday life, landscapes and still life painting. These subjects remained however a quantitative minority in comparison to history painting, which represented a third of the artistic production – as has recently been pointed out by Eric Jan Sluijter (2015). The work of Albert Blankert (1980, 1999) has played a pioneering role in the research on this essential and underestimated part of Dutch seventeenth-century painting, but needs to be re-examined. In particular imprecise and anachronical notions like 'italianate’, ‘pre-classical’, ‘classical’ and ‘classicizing’ (etc.) painting urgently need to be addressed. The great decoration projects in the princely palaces and residences of the Orange family, in city halls, clandestine churches (schuilkerken) and certain private residences occupy a central place only in the very recent historiography (Van Eck 1994, 2008, Van Eikema Hommes, Kolfin 2013). The lack of interest is most remarkable for the oeuvre of Rembrandt. Despite the enormous efforts of the Rembrandt Research Project (1968-2011), Rembrandt’s history paintings – on which his reputation was built – have only been treated in publications that focus on a specific theme, such as his relation to the Bible and religious iconography (Perlove & Silver 2009, DeWitt 2011), with the exception of some recent more ambitious studies (Golahny 2003, Sluijter 2006). Other history painters, who enjoyed great renown in the Seventeenth Century, are largely ignored. Abraham Bloemaert, for example, was probably one of the most reputable and imitated Dutch history painter during the Seventeenth Century, as were some of the artists who passed through his workshop in Utrecht. We can also think of painters who are known to have excelled in a specific artistic domain, but who also featured in the domain of history painting, such as Nicolaes Moeyaert, known almost exclusively as a landscape and animal painter; Jan Steen, painter of everyday life who nonetheless painted biblical scenes; and the portraitist Thomas de Keyser, who also produced religious paintings.

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Important progress has been made with regard to Dutch religious painting, which had long been thought of as quantitatively and qualitatively too negligible to be worth any serious attention. The work of Robert Schillemans (1992), Paul Dirkse (2001), Xander van Eck (2007) and Léonie Marquaille (2015) has challenged these assumptions, showing that the themes that were depicted in religious painting were as varied as the different confessions in the Dutch Republic. The deeply rooted idea, stemming from the Nineteenth Century, that Dutch seventeenth-century society was exclusively Calvinist, has been revised. Protestant sects played a major role in literary and artistic developments. Catholicism was of equal importance for patrons and artists alike until the end of the century (Spaans 1989, Frijhoff 2002). The Dutch Republic was a multiconfessional country, whose artistic production – for that very reason – was without a doubt the most diverse in Europe. The role of religious painting, including numerous subjects from the Old Testament, but also from the New Testament and the lives of saints, was remarkable both with regard to its exceptional adherence to the stipulations of the Counter Reformation as in relation to the complex confessional networks in the Dutch Republic. The diffusion of Tridentine ideas and post-Tridentine treatises did not stop at the borders of the Dutch Republic and did indeed contribute to shape a true Dutch Catholicism – about which one might ask if it coincided with an idiosyncratic art and also contaminated the ideas and representations of other religious denominations.