17th-century Dutch School

17th-century Dutch school.
“Landscape with Figures.”
Oil on canvas.
Measurements: 41 x 32 cm; 57 x 48 cm (frame).
Dutch Baroque painting from around the time of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) is known as Dutch Golden Age painting. It exhibits many characteristics of European Baroque art, with the exception, generally speaking, of a penchant for splendor and themes of Roman Catholicism. Notable is the vast output of the period, intended for the increasingly affluent urban bourgeoisie; this abundance of works was accompanied by the proliferation of pictorial genres. One of these genres was landscape painting, which underwent significant development beginning in the 17th century—a time until which it had not emerged as an independent subject, capable of existing without the need for a narrative.
It was in the paintings of the Dutch school that the consequences of the region’s political emancipation, as well as the economic prosperity of the liberal bourgeoisie, were most openly manifested. The combination of the discovery of nature, objective observation, the study of the concrete, an appreciation of the everyday, a taste for the real and material, and a sensitivity to the seemingly insignificant led the Dutch artist to engage with the reality of daily life, without seeking any ideal alien to that very reality. The painter did not seek to transcend the present and the materiality of objective nature or to escape from tangible reality, but rather to immerse himself in it, to be intoxicated by it through the triumph of realism—a realism of pure illusory fiction, achieved thanks to a perfect and masterful technique and a conceptual subtlety in the lyrical treatment of light. Due to the break with Rome and the iconoclastic tendency of the Reformed Church, religious paintings were eventually eliminated as decorative elements intended for devotional purposes, and mythological stories also lost their heroic and sensual tone, in keeping with the new society. Thus, portraiture, landscape, animal subjects, still life, and genre painting became the thematic forms that gained value in their own right and, as objects typical of domestic furnishings—hence the small size of the paintings—were acquired by individuals from nearly all social classes and strata.