The Golden Age in ART OF THE Dutch Household

Part 1

The Dutch nation of the early seventeenth century was a small country of prosperous, industrious, clever and ambitious people with a broad and fluid middle class. In all of Europe, probably the entire world of the seventeenth century the Dutch were closest to a democratic capitalistic society. While international business and trade, finance, fishing, colonizing and the sea were the foundation of their material wealth and success, the Dutch looked to their homes as an anchoring place for solace and comfort judging from the abundance and richness of artistic creations. The Dutch were primarily responsible for the development of genre painting celebrating ordinary everyday life.

Part 2

Some of the world’s most beloved paintings of domestic interiors and everyday life immortalize the Dutch household and way of life. There are paintings of streets, cities and towns, and rich and humble dwellings. There are paintings of peaceful, serene rooms and small pleasant courtyards. There are paintings of silent women and their docile children and of boisterous “merry companies”. There are fabulous paintings of tables and food.

Rooms in the paintings are uncluttered, elegant and intimate. The Dutch were house-proud and their homes were known for cleanliness and order. Dutch paintings are valuable records about the Dutch household even though artists usually did not paint actual events in Dutch life. Again and again, painters showed a cozy comfortable household cared for by an industrious woman who took pride in cleanliness and order and the well being of the family. As a rule, paintings do not show spiritual or religious activities, intellectuals of the literary sort or creative pursuits except music. Intellectual pursuits in the paintings are generally of the practical kind; business, cartography and science.

This category includes household scenes, tavern scenes, parties and scenes of peasants, soldiers, children and families. Paintings of domestic interiors bring everyday life of the Dutch into sharp focus. As one writer says:

Moral instruction in paintings appealed to the famous Dutch thrift. They could purchase a wall decoration and teach their children about ‘family values’ at the same time. Even pictures that show disreputable people engaged in wickedness had clues to remind the viewer of the wages of sin. A major virtue was hard work. Major vices were gluttony, petty vanity and self-absorption. Perhaps painters hesitated to portray real evil because it was not appropriate for the walls of a Dutch house and would not find a purchaser.

Part 3

To paraphrase Richard Goldthwaite, why did the Dutch produce so much art in the Golden Age? In the Dutch Republic, there was an accumulation of wealth that was a necessary ‘precondition for consumption’ and the success of the economy created a broad and fluid middle class.³

Lyckle de Vries believes Dutch art was influenced by Durer’s belief that the quality of a work of art was not “determined by the beauty of the subject but by how the artist treated it…A work of art’s importance is not determined by subject matter; an artist’s creativity can bestow great value on seemingly trivial matters”. The ordinary could become extraordinary in the hands of a skillful artist.⁴