Dutch school; 17th century.

Dutch school; 17th century.
"Landscape with popular types".
Oil on panel.
Measurements: 31 x 41 cm; 42 x 53 cm (frame).
Seventeenth century Dutch painting depicting a genre scene in a maritime environment. In the foreground appears a man mounted on horseback, stopped at the edge of the road; his erect posture and the bearing of the animal suggest a certain authority or belonging to the wealthy bourgeoisie. Around him, a small group of women fish sellers display their wares, offering their products to the rider with insistent and expressive gestures. Their simple clothes and the basket or bucket where they keep the fish allude to the daily work and the hard coastal trade. Of all the contributions made by northern European countries to the history of art, none has achieved the enduring importance and popularity of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. Evoking the outlines, terrains and atmospheres of the Netherlands more vividly than any other place, large or small, has ever been depicted. Within this tradition, the most revolutionary and enduring Dutch landscape contribution has surely been its naturalism. Seventeenth-century Dutch painters were the first to create a perceptually real and seemingly comprehensive image of their land and people. Although landscape as an independent genre appeared in Flanders in the 16th century, there is no doubt that this type of painting only reached its full development among Dutch artists. It can be said that it was practically they who invented the naturalistic landscape, which they affirmed as an exclusively central feature of their artistic heritage. There is no doubt that the Dutch painter, filled with pride for his land, knew how to show through his paintings the beauty of its vast plains and overcast skies, the regular layout of its canals and meandering rivers, its polders and dikes, its beaches and, of course, its spectacular stormy seas. Despite their naturalism or the inventorial record of fact, Dutch landscapes were at least as much a product of imagination as of observation. The Dutch vision of reality, almost as literal as photography, does not so much trace the os or examine the topography of its surroundings as it naturally selects and reshapes nature to present it in an exemplary way.