Dutch Golden Age painting

It runs from about 1600, with its height from the 1620s to 1672. The northern Netherlands rose against Spanish rule in 1568, and by 1600 the Dutch Republic was the richest trading nation in Europe, with Amsterdam its banking and shipping capital. Spain recognized its independence in 1648. Its great age ended in 1672, the Disaster Year, when France, England and two German bishoprics attacked the Republic at once and the art market collapsed, though painters worked on in its manner to the end of the century.

As a Protestant republic, it had no royal court to paint for, and its Calvinist churches had whitewashed walls and no altarpieces. Instead, painters sold to the public, at fairs, in shops and through dealers, and historians estimate that millions of paintings were made in the Republic over the century. Even bakers and farmers hung them at home.

Rembrandt van Rijn came from Leiden to Amsterdam in 1631 and made his name with The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp in 1632. His The Night Watch of 1642 turned a militia company's portrait into a scene of movement and light; it was never a night scene, and only darkening varnish gave it the name. He went bankrupt in 1656 and painted himself again and again to the end of his life, as in his Self-Portrait of 1658.

Johannes Vermeer worked in Delft and left only some thirty-five paintings, mostly of women alone in quiet rooms lit from the left. Girl with a Pearl Earring is not a portrait of anyone known but a tronie, a study of a face and a costume. Marcel Proust thought View of Delft the most beautiful painting in the world. Vermeer was nearly forgotten until a French critic rediscovered him in the 1860s.

In Haarlem, Frans Hals painted with quick, loose strokes that caught a laugh or a glance, as in the Laughing Cavalier, who is smiling, not laughing. Judith Leyster, one of the few women admitted to Haarlem's painters' guild, painted The Jolly Toper. Jan Steen painted such cheerful chaos that a messy home is still called a Jan Steen household in Dutch. Carel Fabritius painted The Goldfinch in 1654, the year he was killed in the explosion of Delft's gunpowder store, and Jacob van Ruisdael painted The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede under a towering sky.

After 1672 Dutch painting grew smoother and more French in taste, and the great names were gone. Its influence came later. The Realists of the nineteenth century took up its ordinary subjects, Manet and the Impressionists learned from Hals's loose brushwork, and Van Gogh, a Dutchman himself, said he would give ten years of his life to sit for a fortnight in front of Rembrandt's Jewish Bride.