110 DECEMBER 2017
IMAGES COURTESY OF RIJKSMUSEUM(AGNSW) for Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age: Masterpieces from the
Rijksmuseum, 78 artworks from Rembrandt to Vermeer, Jan Steen, Frans
Hals and Jacob van Ruisdael.
While Dutch art is often associated with the arresting works of post-
Impressionist painter van Gogh, the group of artists associated with the
Golden Age brought alive one of the most dynamic periods in the
Netherland’s history. It was a time of unprecedented wealth and
cultural richness that followed the northern Dutch regions of the
Netherlands gaining independence from Spain in 1648, finding
considerable religious and political freedom as they did. Economic
prosperity followed, with international trade capitalising on the
region’s strategic coastal position to venture outside the traditional
European trade routes to the spice routes of Asia and beyond.
This expansion and knowledge had a profound effect on the art world.
Not only did it provide rich new subjects to explore, from maritime
adventures to cartography and mysterious goods from faraway lands; this
Golden Age had created a large new middle class determined to show off
their affluence and sophistication by buying and commissioning art to
decorate their canal-side mansions. By the early 1600s the Netherlands
was enjoying a thriving artistic climate unlike any other in Europe.
“One of the most important characteristics of this country in the 17th
century is it wasn’t the church or noble courts that was the main
commissioner to the arts, it was the well-to-do middle class,” says the
Rijksmuseum’s curator of 17th-century Dutch painting, Pieter Roelofs,
who is co-curating the Sydney exhibition with AGNSW curator Peter
Raissis. “Around 1.5 million people commissioned between six and 10
million paintings, which is huge. Some owned over 300 paintings in one
single house. It became a very visual culture.”
Such was the demand for art and so prolific the output that artists
began specialising: in portraiture commissioned for the first time by
regular people, not the church or nobility; in still lifes and landscape;
and then perfecting genres within that specialisation – Melchior →Vanitas still life (circa 1660–65)
by Aelbert Jansz. van der Schoor.VOGUE CULTURE