Dutch Painting

This beautifully illustrated, expansive overview of Dutch and Flemish art during the 17th century illuminates the creative achievements of one of the most important eras in western art. The Golden Age in Holland and Flanders roughly spanned the 17th century and was a period of enormous advances in the fields of commerce, science--and art. Still lifes, landscape paintings, and romantic depictions of everyday life became valued by the increasingly wealthy merchant classes in the Dutch provinces, while religious and historic paintings as well as portraits continued to appeal to the Flemish patronage. The Golden Age brought us Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens, and Van Dyck, but it was also the period of Frans Hals' revolutionary portraiture, Adriaen Brouwer's depictions of the working class at play, Jan Brueghel's velvety miniatures, and Hendrick Avercamp's lively winter landscapes. Norbert Wolf applies his vast understanding of the interplay between history, culture, and art to explore the forces that led to the Golden Age in Holland and Flanders and how this period influenced later generations of artists. Accompanied by luminous color illustrations, Wolf's accessible text considers the complex political, religious, social, and economic situation that led to newfound prosperity and, thus, to an enormous artistic output that we continue to marvel at and enjoy today.

The stunning beauty and diversity of 17th-century Dutch still-life painting raises many questions about developments in style and technique. What materials did artists use to produce these works? How were they made? Did all the still-life painters of the period use the same methods and materials? Can we relate differences in materials and methods to differences in style? These questions are explored by the conservators and curators of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum and scientists attached to the Molart project (Molecular aspect of aging in art) in an examination of paintings by Jan Brueghel, Balthasar van der Ast, Jan Davidsz de Heem, Willem Kalf, Rachel Ruysch, and Jan van Huysum.

The appealing genre paintings of great seventeenth-century Dutch artists - Vermeer, Steen, de Hooch, Dou and others - have long enjoyed tremendous popularity. This comprehensive book explores the evolution of genre painting throughout the Dutch Golden Age, beginning in the early 1600s and continuing through the opening years of the next century. Wayne Franits, a well-known scholar of Dutch genre painting, offers a wealth of information about these works as well as about seventeenth-century Dutch culture, its predilections and its prejudices. The author approaches genre paintings from a variety of perspectives, examining their reception among contemporary audiences and setting the works in their political, cultural and economic contexts. The works emerge as distinctly conventional images, Franits shows, as genre artists continually replicated specific styles, motifs and a surprisingly restricted number of themes over the course of several generations. Luxuriously illustrated and with a full representation of the major artists and the cities where genre painting flourished, this book will delight students, scholars and general readers alike.

Heda's Banquet Piece, Frans Hals' Willem Coymans, and Rembrandt's Lucretia. Paintings by these and other masters attracted the American collectors P. A. B. Widener, his son Joseph, and Andrew W. Mellon, whose bequests form the heart of the National Gallery's distinguished and remarkably cohesive collection of ninety-one Dutch paintings.

Dutch art spans the history of Western easel painting from the Middle Ages to the present, and has a psychological development of its own which makes it a fascinating field of study.

This new edition of an established survey of the Golden Age of Dutch painting has been revised, corrected, and updated in the text, notes, and bibliography as a result of new scholarship. The author has written a new preface to this edition. Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, Ruisdael, Cuyp, de Witte, van Goyen, van de Velde, Hobbema, Fabritius, de Hooch, and Saenrendam are some of the painters included and discussed.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Story of Dutch Painting" by Charles H. Caffin. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.