Landscape painting was another of the genres that had developed little before the Dutch Golden Age, when it became one of the most popular. It also proved an interesting challenge for its exponents, who had to fill their canvases with a land that was almost completely flat. The favoured solution was to look to the heavens, resulting in the first cloudscapes.

Simon de Vlieger’s Beach View from 1643 uses boats, many figures, and careful composition to swell the land over the bottom of its panel. It shows well, though, how important is the sky, marvellously rendered here, with a small group of white birds shown against the grey of the clouds. De Vlieger was born in Rotterdam, and painted in Delft and Amsterdam, where he was best known for his landscapes.

Jan van Goyen’s View of Dordrecht with the Grote Kirk Across the Maas from 1644 is another example of a low horizon cramming a lot of detail into the foot of the painting, leaving the major part devoted to sky.

The action and excitement, even fear, in Aelbert Cuyp’s Thunderstorm over Dordrecht from about 1645 is in its bolt of lightning, with the cattle lying passive in the fields below.

At about the same time, Jacob van Ruisdael painted his first panoramic landscape, this View of Naarden and the Church of Muiderberg from 1647. Still working on a very wide support orientated conventionally in ‘landscape’ mode, his immense sky is no passive backdrop to the land, but the scene of intriguing cloud formations.

Salomon van Ruysdael filled his panels and canvases with the sky, as in his View of Alkmaar from the Sea from about 1650, where he has turned his panel from the usual ‘landscape’ mode. Clouds had now become subjects in their own right, and differences in their form and texture some of the most important features.

At their best, Cuyp’s coastal landscapes, such as The Maas at Dordrecht from about 1650, are full of rich light, earning him the nickname of the Dutch Claude Lorrain. This shows a passage boat packed with passengers, together with its drummer, below a finely detailed sky.

Cuyp also populated the strip at the foot of his landscapes with farm animals. In his Cows in a River from about 1650, the landscape has been minimised to concentrate on the cattle, although most of his panel is still taken by its striking sky.

Unless backed by elevated dunes, there was no way that an artist could expand thin strips of beach and sea. The dominant towers of cumulus clouds in Adriaen van de Velde’s View of a Beach from 1663-65 have become his subjects.

Jacob van Ruisdael also turned his canvases for these portraits of towering clouds, as in his View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields from about 1665. The distant town of Haarlem with its monumentally large church of Saint Bavo – works of man – are dwarfed by these high cumulus clouds, the works of God. This motif proved so popular that van Ruisdael painted many variants of the same view, making it now one of the most widespread landscapes across the galleries of Europe.

Other artists like Philip de Koninck marvelled at cloud formations, here in his River Landscape from just after the end of the Golden Age, in 1676.

The Dutch Golden Age brought the rapid development of painting genres such as still life, but its most explosive growth was in those depicting everyday life, from interiors showing domestic activities to maritime views. This article introduces some of those new themes.

Painting scenes of ordinary people undertaking the activities of everyday life, commonly if unhelpfully known as genre painting, was one of the most popular through this period.

Gerard ter Borch’s The Spinner from about 1655 is a fine example with its outstanding rendering of the properties of its different surfaces. Seated at her spinning loom in front of her bed, and with her lapdog in place, this ordinary woman is doing what she did as a matter of routine. Ter Borch’s life and career were based in the Dutch Republic, but he also travelled across Europe, and was even honoured with a knighthood when he was working in Madrid.

Jan Vermeer is now best known for his series of paintings of middle-class women in rooms in his house, lit from the windows on the left of the painting. However, he also painted two remarkable works showing the world outside his house in the city of Delft: this townscape of a street and its occupants in The Little Street above, and the View of Delft waterfront below.

The Republic’s thriving cities, where its artists had their workshops, became the focus of a novel type of landscape depicting their buildings and open spaces, instead of trees and fields.

Gerrit Berckheyde’s view of Groote Market in Haarlem from 1673 shows one the largest of the city’s marketplaces at the close of the Golden Age. He was based in this city, which he documented extensively in his cityscapes.

The Republic had a long shoreline, extensive rivers and canals, and the huge enclosed body of water Zuiderzee. Its merchant and military navies were among the largest of the time. Inevitably, water became a substantial part of Dutch painting, and seascapes were another novel development.

Jan van Goyen’s View of Dordrecht with the Grote Kirk Across the Maas (1644) shows a skyline dominated by the still-unfinished 65 metre tower of the Grote Kerk, built between 1285-1470. At the edges of the city are several windmills, which were already associated with the Republic. Van Goyen studied in Haarlem, then set up his studio in The Hague.

Meindert Hobbema’s view of The Haarlem Lock, Amsterdam from 1663-65 is a good example of a working lock with a raising bridge, showing the masts of many ships in the harbour beyond. A pupil of Jacob van Ruisdael, Hobbema was based in Amsterdam throughout his life.

The great masters of Dutch landscape art like Jacob van Ruisdael must have painted many hundreds of windmills, of which one of the best-known is this view of The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede from about 1670. This small town, now a city, is on the bank of the River Rhine, an ideal location for delivering grain by barge, and shipping the resulting flour. Van Ruisdael trained and started his career in Haarlem, then moved to Amsterdam.

With its long coastline and sandy beaches, the Republic was probably the birthplace of the beachscape.

Among Adriaen van de Velde’s earliest surviving paintings are several beach scenes, including The Beach at Scheveningen (1658), which are exceptional for someone who was only twenty-one at the time. Despite the dress and wagons, this has a timeless quality, and gives the most wonderful impression of light and space. Scheveningen is part of the coast of The Hague, although this artist worked in Amsterdam.

More traditional landscapes were adapted to cope with the flat land, and their emphasis shifted to the clouds above.

Under the clouds of Philip de Koninck’s Distant View With Cottages Along a Road (1655), a lone man sits by a pond at the lower right. Behind him a rutted road runs past cottages, down towards a bridge over a river and two towns beyond. The land forms a minority of the view, though, as most of it is cloud. De Koninck was another lifelong resident of Amsterdam.

The Golden Age coincided with a cold phase in the climate, the Little Ice Age, with 1650 the start of its coldest period. Dutch landscapes took advantage of the icy scenes each winter.

Aert van der Neer’s beautifully-lit Sports on a Frozen River (c 1660) includes several who are playing colf, an antecedent of golf which was also played during the warmer months, but was most distinctively played on frozen rivers and canals. This artist also lived in Amsterdam.

Perhaps inevitably, the Dutch Republic profited well from those harsh winters, its merchants doing a thriving trade exporting food to countries whose crops had failed because of the cold weather. Dutch artists appear to have done likewise, and their paintings of winter are now found across Europe, and remain popular on Christmas cards.