From the start of the Eighty Years’ War with Habsburg Spain, through the Union of Utrecht, foundation of the East India Company, tulip mania, and abundant Rembrandts.
Golden Age
After the Disaster Year of 1672, the art market collapsed. Dutch artists reverted to the more traditional, but their impact on secular themes, and genres including landscapes and still life has endured.
Watermills by Jacob van Ruisdael and Meindert Hobbema, and a selection of windmills by Rembrandt, Jan van Goyen, and a later copy by John Constable.
At the end of the Golden Age, he specialised in painting the Dark Arts, with astrology, rejuvenation, witchcraft, and faerie allegories.
Five paintings of women in trouble: Ariadne on Naxos, Mary Magdalen, an allegory of logic, the disillusioned Medea, and Cydippe with the apple of Acontius.
The Annunciation, and myth of Vertumnus and Pomona, a tale from Roman history, a favourite fable, stories of schools and a concert of the birds.
A dentist draws a tooth outside a church, a man reckons he holds the winning card, and the five most humorous interpretations of the senses.
More rich and lucent skies light cavalry troopers, migrating peasants, the baptism of an Ethiopian eunuch, and a river scene. Then he suddenly stopped painting.
Trained as a landscape painter, he used his landscapes for genre scenes, animal and human portraits, even myths and a religious work, and was influenced by Claude Lorrain.
One of the founding fathers of animal painting, his Young Bull is almost life-sized and ranked alongside Rembrandt’s work, but he died at the age of only 28.
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