Dutch Merchant Painting

Dutch painting in the age of rembrandt and.

Dutch merchant painting. Now numbering more than 150 paintings the collection comprises examples of the portraits genre scenes landscapes marine paintings. Painting flowered as artists focused on everyday scenes of ordinary life expressed through a growing cadre of genre works all indicative of the thriving creative period. Similarly theories that the painting was once a shop sign perhaps that of the hague bookseller and wine merchant cornelis de putter playing on the birds dutch nickname feel far fetched. This style of ornate still life painting was developed in the 1640s in antwerp by flemish artists such as frans snyders osias beert adriaen van utrecht and a whole generation of dutch golden age painters.

As part of the movement called utrecht caravaggism terbrugghen brought light and shadow interplay darkness and illumination to dutch canvases everywhere. The collection of dutch seventeenth century paintings in the national gallery of art includes works by the masters of the golden age including rembrandt van rijn johannes vermeer frans hals and aelbert cuyp. They display the dutch flag of orange white and blue. Dutch canvases such as those that vermeer would create a few decades after terbrugghens death.

The three ships in this large painting are the wide bellied seagoing vessels that transported much of hollands mercantile cargo. The enormous success of 17th century dutch painting overpowered the work of subsequent generations and no dutch painter of the 18th centurynor arguably a 19th century one before van goghis well known outside the netherlands. Although hals enjoyed success during his lifetime he was largely forgotten by the generations that followed. The womens pearls and pieters gold buttons and buckles.

Already by the end of the period artists were complaining that buyers were more interested in dead than living artists. It hangs in one of the first rooms of the exhibit class distinctions. They painted still lifes that emphasized abundance by depicting a diversity of objects fruits flowers and dead game often together with living people and animals. A third example of a painting that defied traditional dutch social decorum depicts senior merchant pieter cnoll who in 1665 commissioned a family portrait of himself and his wife their two daughters and two servants fig.

6 the presence of the servants also signals cnolls high status though they represent only a small number of the fifty slaves he owned. Article wikipedia article references frans hals is one of the most celebrated and prominent painters of the dutch golden age probably only second to rembrandt or vermeer. 5 the forthcoming 1680 code would outlaw the finery paraded here. With hendrick terbrugghen came the influence of caravaggio into dutch painting.