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[[caption]] The Game of Cards By Hendrik Van Der Burch [[/caption]]

Genre and landscape painting are the most characteristic and at the same time the most popular expression of Dutch seventeenth century art. There are, of course, besides a limited number of religious, mythological and allegorical paintings, the field of portraiture, in which these masters excelled; but their contribution in this direction was not as new as in the other fields, nor will it ever be as popular, for the influence exercised upon the general public by the subject matter of paintings is here largely lacking. Either the sitter is not known at all, or if known is of little historical interest. Long before portrait painting was developed in the seventeenth century in Holland it had already existed as an independent art in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy, Germany and other countries, as well as in the Netherlands. But no other country can boast of having so early developed genre and landscape art, freeing it from the bonds of religious painting and mastering it to so high a degree as Holland at the time of Frans Hals and Rembrandt.

Long before the seventeenth century, the love of realism, inborn with the inhabitants of the Low Countries, had enlivened the religious scenes of the early masters with carefully rendered landscape backgrounds and motives from daily life. It was not, however, until the Reformation and the resulting wars which liberated the Teutonic countries from Spain and Italy, that church painting was replaced by secular painting, pure landscape and genre scenes. This does not mean that the idealistic or spiritual sense apparent in the religious art of former days had entirely disappeared; it was only that it expressed itself in different forms. We remember that it was in tolerant Holland, the refuge of exiled members of the most diverse religious sects from all over the world, that there originated the pantheistic philosophy of Spinoza, the belief that God is not aloof from and outside of the earth, but that he is within all objects, forming the soul of everything, even the smallest particle of matter. With this view of life in the background, the Dutch masters filled the minutest details of their paintings with meaning, seeming to give a soul not only to people and animals, but to inorganic nature as well - to the sea and air, to the forests and rocks, to the houses and even to the costumes of their inhabitants. This new optimism begins by penetrating the simplest form of realistic composition, the still life, and ends with the grandiose and poetical hymns which masters like Ruisdael or Cuyp sing of the richness and infinity of landscape forms. Their greatest creations are filled with a lofty idealism which produces emotions in the spectator akin to those inspired by church music or church architecture. 

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Our exhibition gives an adequate idea of the development of Dutch genre and landscape art during the three periods in which it reached its greatest height: the time of the most extensive influence of Frans Hals (about 1620-40), of Rembrandt (1640-60), and of Vermeer (1660-75). The influence of these three great masters can easily be recognized, although they themselves are too great to be classified with the specialists of either genre or landscape painting. These minor yet delightful artists went the way of the masses, following the course demanded by the art-loving public; yet it so happened that when Frans Hals painted a few genre paintings, or Rembrandt drew for his pleasure a series of realistic street or domestic scenes, or painted a few fantastic landscapes, or when Vermeer expressed his idea of landscape art in one single composition (the famous View of Delft) the specialists could not help being greatly fascinated and influenced by the unusual vision of these leaders in art. Frans Hals had numerous pupils among the genre painters, who tried to imitate the example he had given in his few masterpieces of genre painting or of children's portraits, like the "Fisher Boy" or the "Young Violin Player." Two of these, Jan Mienze Molenaer and his wife, Judith Leyster, the best woman painter in Holland, are represented in the exhibition with works characteristic of the Haarlem school, from which such important masters as the two Ostades, Terborch, and Pieter de Hooch developed, all of whom are shown in our exhibition in examples of their later periods, when Rembrandt's influence had replaced that of Frans Hals.

Rembrandt was too deeply interested in the study of character and the varying moods to be bothered with depicting episodes from the daily life of the peasant or bourgeois class. But his pupils soon discovered that they had not enough genius to fill a painting solely with the deep expression of a single face as Rembrandt did, and were compelled to add action or even anecdotes to their compositions in order to make them interesting to their public. Thus we observe how some of the best pupils of Rembrandt turned his pure portraiture into genre scenes, or became actual genre painters, like Nicolaes Maes in his "Sleeping Young Woman" or Gerbrand von den Eeckhout in the "Party on a Terrace" which precedes Pieter de Hooch's similar compositions.

While we still feel the effects of the war in wild behavior and roughness of some of the soldier and peasant scenes of the earlier part of the seventeenth century, manners have become more quiet in Rembrandt's time, the bourgeoisie has settled down and has developed a sort of aristocracy which enjoys being represented in the social scenes of the genre painters. While Terborch in his earlier works still shows his connection with the Frans Hals period, in the scenes depicted by him in his developed style we are in the best Dutch society. The refined taste of this artist creates exquisite color harmonies and a most delicate technic, showing his subtlety in costume painting. His portraits ("Portrait of a Young Man Reading") are closely related to his genre paintings both in their smallness of size and the careful execution of costume and accessories.

Pieter de Hooch has been rightly famous for his depiction of the peace and happiness of the home life of the Dutch middle class and for the intimacy and warm glowing atmosphere with which he surrounds these scenes wherein a young woman usually plays a part, either alone with her child, as in the Detroit picture, or in the company of cavaliers.

Even the boisterous Jan Steen, with his great narrative and humorous art, became more quiet at the time when Rembrandt was all-powerful, taking pleasure in a careful and often brilliant execution, and painting scenes of the love experiences of gay young women, scenes apparently pleasant but behind which a Shakespearian wit and irony are carefully hidden ("The Family of the Artist in a Garden"). The three excellent examples of his art executed in the sixties of the seventeenth century—the decade when all Dutch art reached its greatest height—show him at his best and are masterly in the characterization of the individual figures as well as in the dramatization of the story, in the latter of which he surpassed all other Dutch masters. 

The third period of genre painting, whose greatest exponent is Jan Vermeer, shows the beginning of French influence and a cooler color scheme, together with an aiming at a greater elegance in composition and in the pose of his figures, a more conscious balancing of the groups and rhythm of movement, a more refined technique and a smoother surface. While Vermeer is unfortunately not represented in the exhibition, we see his influence in the paintings by Jacob Ochtervelt, the best Dutch artist of the last third of the seventeenth century; by Hendrik van der Burch, a Delft master who comes so near to Vermeer at times that he has been mistaken for him (in the painting in the exhibition he tries to combine the styles of Pieter de Hooch and Vermeeer); and by Caspar Netscher and Frans van Mieris, who were in their own time and in the eighteenth century most fashionable painters.

Today the two most popular of the Dutch seventeenth century landscape painters are perhaps Hobbema and Cuyp, both well represented in American collections. And indeed their art is a fascinating one, as the present exhibition also shows. The broad and modern brushwork of Hobbema, his sunlit distances through open woods, are equally as pleasing as Aelbert Cuyp's beautiful unity of golden atmosphere or his marvellous cloud effects. Unfortunately Hobbema is represented only by a small painting which represents him in his earlier style, when his motifs show a greater variety and are closer to nature than his characteristic forest scenes, the great masterpieces of his latest period.