Dutch Golden Age Paintings: 7 Masterpieces and the Stories Behind Them

Dutch Golden Age paintings are the portraits, city views, household scenes and landscapes made in the Dutch Republic during its boom years, a period usually dated from the Republic’s founding around 1588 to 1672, the Rampjaar or “disaster year” when French troops overran most of its northern provinces. The seven below run in the order they were painted, from a Haarlem portrait of 1624 to a river view of about 1670, and three of them, The Night Watch, Girl with a Pearl Earring and View of Delft, are among the most famous paintings in the world.

Very little of this art was made for churches. As a firm Protestant, the average Dutch burgher had no use for ornate religious pictures, and his churches were stark and whitewashed, as Essential Vermeer, a reference site on the painter and his world, puts it. Painters sold to households instead. In his essay on Dutch landscape for the Met, curator Walter Liedtke explains that very few such pictures were commissioned: they were sold at fairs, from studios or through dealers, and a signature helped a painter’s name stick. Peter Mundy, an English traveler in Amsterdam in 1640, saw where they ended up: “many tymes blacksmithes, Cobblers, ets...will have some picture or another by their Forge and in their stalle.”

At a glance

#	Painting	Artist	Year	Where to see it
1	The Laughing Cavalier	Frans Hals	1624	Wallace Collection, London
2	The Night Watch	Rembrandt van Rijn	1642	Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
3	The Goldfinch	Carel Fabritius	1654	Mauritshuis, The Hague
4	View of Delft	Johannes Vermeer	c. 1660–1661	Mauritshuis, The Hague
5	Girl with a Pearl Earring	Johannes Vermeer	c. 1665	Mauritshuis, The Hague
6	The Feast of St Nicholas	Jan Steen	1665–1668	Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
7	The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede	Jacob van Ruisdael	c. 1668–1670	Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Haarlem and Amsterdam: portraits that move

01The Laughing Cavalier, Frans Hals (1624)

The man in The Laughing Cavalier is neither laughing nor a cavalier. The Wallace Collection in London, which owns the canvas, says the catchy title was attached around 1888 and simply never changed, and the Met’s Walter Liedtke calls it a formal portrait in which a dignified gentleman faintly smiles. He was 26 when Hals painted him, dressed in the latest French fashions that only the Dutch elite could get, and his doublet is embroidered with emblems of fortune, strength, love and virtue. The museum does not name him. His left-facing pose suggests a bachelor, since husbands in paired marriage portraits usually turned right, toward their wives.

The canvas measures 83 × 67.3 cm (32.7 × 26.5 in) and hangs in the museum’s Great Gallery. Look at the black sash: the Wallace Collection uses it to show how much Hals could do with a limited palette, the quality that led Van Gogh to say Hals must have had 27 blacks. From the 1860s on, his pictures in the Haarlem museum drew Courbet, Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Sargent and Whistler to see how he handled a brush.

02The Night Watch, Rembrandt van Rijn (1642)

Its official title is Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. The nickname first turns up in a document of 1797, and Britannica traces it to the thick, dark yellow varnish on the canvas. Rembrandt had the commission before December 1640, when one of the guardsmen he portrayed died, and signed the finished work “Rembrandt f 1642.” Painted in oil on canvas, The Night Watch measures 379.5 × 453.5 cm (149.4 × 178.5 in), his largest picture, and the City of Amsterdam has lent it to the Rijksmuseum since 1808.

The original and our hand-painted copy

The original

Our reproduction, painted by hand in oil

Militia portraits normally lined their members up in rows or around a banquet table. Rembrandt, the Rijksmuseum says, was the first to paint the figures of a group portrait actually doing something: the captain is telling his lieutenant to start the company marching, and the light picks out his gesturing hand and a young girl behind them, the company’s mascot. A shield beside the gate names 18 men, and Britannica counts 34 figures in all, so 16 of them are not portraits of real people.

In 1715 the canvas moved to the Town Hall on the Dam, and four pieces were cut off so it would fit between two doors, the biggest from the left side. They have never been found. It has since survived a knife attack in 1911, twelve cuts in 1975 and acid in 1990, and the museum counts at least 25 treatments. Operation Night Watch, its research project on the canvas, is the most extensive in the painting’s history. For Rembrandt beyond this one canvas, see the most famous Rembrandt paintings.

Delft in the 1650s and 1660s

03The Goldfinch, Carel Fabritius (1654)

Fabritius trained with Rembrandt in Amsterdam from about 1641 to 1643, then settled in Delft, where his pictures grew far lighter. The Goldfinch is signed and dated “C FABRITIVS 1654” and painted in oil on a thick panel only 33.5 × 22.8 cm (13.2 × 9.0 in), sawn from a larger board. That cut has fed theories about its first use, and the Mauritshuis lists three: part of a cage with a painted bird meant to fool the eye, a small door to a wall niche, or the door of a cupboard protecting another painting. The low viewpoint, which assumes you are looking up at it, supports the niche idea.

As a painter, the passage I would go to first is the wing: Fabritius laid two strokes of yellow over black and scratched into the wet paint with the pointed end of his brush, a trick the museum says he learned from Rembrandt. On October 12 of that same year the Delft powder magazine exploded, and Fabritius died of his injuries at 32. No more than twelve of his paintings survive.

The Mauritshuis bought the panel at a Paris sale in 1896. Donna Tartt later built a best-selling novel around it, with the painting on the cover. Our guides to seeing The Goldfinch at the Mauritshuis and to the Delft explosion of 1654 go further.

04View of Delft, Johannes Vermeer (c. 1660–1661)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

The Mauritshuis calls it the most celebrated cityscape in 17th-century Dutch art. Vermeer looked at Delft from the southeast, across the Kolk, a triangular harbor at the city’s southern edge, on a still morning with the sun in the east. Then he improved on reality. Compared with topographical drawings of the spot, his skyline is tidier, the bridge between the Schiedam and Rotterdam Gates is straighter and longer, and the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk, which holds the tomb of William of Orange, has been nudged toward the middle and lit by full sun. Tiny dots of paint on the hull of a boat near the Rotterdam Gate stand in for sparkle off the water.

View of Delft is oil on canvas, 96.5 × 115.7 cm (38.0 × 45.6 in), with Vermeer’s monogram on the boat at lower left, and the museum bought it at an Amsterdam sale in 1822. Marcel Proust saw it there in October 1902 and again in May 1921, when it was lent to an exhibition of Dutch painting at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. In the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time, his novelist Bergotte dies of a heart attack in front of it. That May, Proust wrote to the writer Jean-Louis Vaudoyer:

05Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer (c. 1665)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Vermeer’s most famous painting is not a portrait. The Mauritshuis classes Girl with a Pearl Earring as a tronie, a study of a type or character rather than a likeness. Dutch girls of the time did not wear turbans, and the pearl is too large to be real: perhaps glass, perhaps invented. Vermeer made it with little more than two strokes, a bright highlight at upper left and the soft reflection of the white collar beneath. The canvas is 44.5 × 39 cm (17.5 × 15.4 in).

In 1881 it came up at auction in The Hague, badly neglected. The collector Arnoldus Andries des Tombe and his friend Victor de Stuers agreed not to bid against each other, and Des Tombe got it for two guilders plus thirty cents mark-up. When he died in December 1902, a secret will left it to the Mauritshuis with eleven other pictures. A research project that began there in 2018, Girl in the Spotlight, found that the dark background was once a green curtain, lost to physical and chemical changes in the translucent green paint, and that Vermeer had given her tiny eyelashes, invisible to the naked eye.

In Amsterdam, the Rijksmuseum has Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, dated about 1660, which the museum bought in 1908 together with 38 other paintings from the heirs of the Six family. Our list of every Vermeer painting and where to see each one covers the rest.

The last years before 1672

06The Feast of St Nicholas, Jan Steen (1665–1668)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

St Nicholas comes in December, and in the Netherlands, the Rijksmuseum notes, the feast has been kept the same way for centuries: good children get presents, naughty ones a switch, a bundle of twigs, in their shoe. Steen fits all of it into The Feast of St Nicholas. The little girl in front holds a doll of St John the Baptist and a bucket of treats, the boy at left is wailing over his shoe, a basket of cakes and rolls sits on the floor, and young people by the chimney sing a St Nicholas song. Painted between 1665 and 1668, it is oil on canvas, 82 × 70.5 cm (32.3 × 27.8 in), and has belonged to the Rijksmuseum since 1809.

Steen (1626–1679) made a specialty of unruly households, the Met notes, and his name stuck to the idea: as its curator Adam Eaker tells it, Dutch parents can still warn children that their room is starting to look like a household by Jan Steen.

07The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede, Jacob van Ruisdael (c. 1668–1670)

Ruisdael (1628/29–1682) left around 700 paintings, by Britannica’s count, and the Met’s Walter Liedtke calls him the greatest of the Dutch landscapists. In this late canvas the mill rises against dark rain clouds and overshadows the castle and church of Wijk bij Duurstede, with the River Lek in front. The Rijksmuseum explains its fame in one line: Ruisdael gathered the typical Dutch elements, low land, water and wide sky, and made them converge on the mill, just as typically Dutch. The painting measures 83 × 101 cm (32.7 × 39.8 in) and belongs to the City of Amsterdam, which lends it to the museum.

Dutch landscape had changed a great deal by then. In the “tonal” phase of Haarlem landscape, from the late 1620s into the 1640s, Jan van Goyen and Salomon van Ruysdael set the pace. Jacob van Ruisdael and his former pupil Meindert Hobbema made their careers in Amsterdam in the 1650s and 1660s, when the city was at its most prosperous, and their reputations were made later still, between the early 18th and early 20th centuries, in London, Paris, Berlin and New York.

Why Dutch painters specialized

On an open market, a recognizable subject sold. Some painters specialized in one subject, as Hendrick Avercamp did with ice-skating scenes; others, like Aert van der Neer, moved among nocturnes, sunsets and skating scenes. Theory ranked the subjects. In 1678 the painter Samuel van Hoogstraten put still life on the lowest grade and history painting on the highest, with scenes of daily life, the “little trifles,” in between. Prices did not follow the theory: the Met’s Jennifer Meagher notes that those trifles were produced in great quantity, often fetched large sums and were collected by bakers, burghers and princes alike. The word “genre” for them came later, probably from the French writer Quatremère de Quincy toward the end of the 18th century.

Behind it all was an unusually urban country. In the province of Holland, home to Amsterdam, Haarlem, Leiden and The Hague, as much as 70 percent of the people lived in towns, and Liedtke names urbanization as the most fundamental of the factors behind secular subjects such as landscape, still life and genre. The volume is hard to picture: Essential Vermeer cites an estimate of no less than 5 million paintings made in the Republic between 1600 and 1700. When the economy sank in the 1670s, low prices pushed painters like Van der Neer toward volume and repetition.

Seeing the seven, and what comes next

Six of these paintings stay in the Netherlands, three at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and three at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, and The Laughing Cavalier is in London. For how painters elsewhere answered the same centuries, our guides to famous German paintings and famous Russian paintings make a good next stop, and our famous paintings page gathers the best-known works from every period.

Sources

• The Laughing Cavalier, Wallace Collection
• The Laughing Cavalier (P84), Wallace Collection catalogue entry
• Frans Hals (1582/83–1666), Walter Liedtke, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Met
• The Night Watch (SK-C-5), Rijksmuseum
• 10 things about Rembrandt’s Night Watch, Rijksmuseum
• The Night Watch, Encyclopaedia Britannica
• The Goldfinch (inv. 605), Mauritshuis
• Mauritshuis launches website The Goldfinch, a bird’s eye view (press release), Mauritshuis
• Carel Fabritius, Encyclopaedia Britannica
• View of Delft (inv. 92), Mauritshuis
• Marcel Proust, autograph letter to Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, [1 May 1921], Aguttes auction catalogue
• Girl with a Pearl Earring (inv. 670), Mauritshuis
• Closer to Vermeer and the Girl (Girl in the Spotlight research), Mauritshuis
• The Milkmaid (SK-A-2344), Rijksmuseum
• The Feast of St Nicholas (SK-A-385), Rijksmuseum
• Jan Steen, The Dissolute Household, with audio commentary by Adam Eaker, The Met
• The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede (SK-C-211), Rijksmuseum
• Jacob van Ruisdael, Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Landscape Painting in the Netherlands, Walter Liedtke, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Met
• Genre Painting in Northern Europe, Jennifer Meagher, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Met
• The Golden Age of Dutch Art, Essential Vermeer
• Judith Leyster, Encyclopaedia Britannica
• The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede, image file, Wikimedia Commons (from the Rijksmuseum)