As organised occupational groups, guilds have ancient origins, and in Roman times were known as collegia. Although they were an important part of Renaissance society, few if any appear to have commissioned group portraits, which were largely confined to families at that time. This changed in the Dutch Golden Age, and some of its best-known paintings depict occupational and other groups.

In 1617, Michiel van Mierevelt and his son Pieter, specialists in portraiture, painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Willem van der Meer, one of the earliest portraits of a social group from the Dutch Golden Age. Members of this group are all ignoring the cadaver in front of them, preferring to look at the painter, and are thought to be members of the Surgeons’ Guild of the city of Delft, who commissioned this work.

Rembrandt painted his Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp in 1632, as an early commission soon after his arrival in Amsterdam. It’s a group portrait of distinguished members of the Surgeons’ Guild in their working environment. Most remarkable is the fact that its principal, Dr Tulp, and most of his colleagues aren’t looking at the dissected forearm.

As cities developed in the Dutch Republic, guilds and associations flourished. This wasn’t a period of peace, and most towns and cities required adult males to be members of the local civic militia or schutterij for mutual defence. These were operated using the guild model, with local men appointed to military rank for their command. Their roles included helping defend the town or city in the event of attack or revolt, and manning a night watch, in which members took turns to patrol the streets.

One of the earlier of these group portraits is Frans Hals’ Banquet of the Officers of the Calivermen Civic Guard from 1627. Contemporary records have enabled their identification as (from the left) Willem Claesz. Vooght, Johan Damius, Willem Warmont, Johan Schatter, Gilles de Wildt, Nicolaes van Napels, Outgert Akersloot, Matthijs Haeswindius, Adriaen Matham, Lot Schout, Pieter Ramp, and Willem Ruychaver at the right.

The cost of these group portraits was relatively modest, as it was normally shared between those depicted. In most cases shares weren’t equal, but determined by the member’s rank in the organisation.

Hendrik Gerritsz Pot used the novel technique of putting indigo layers over underpainting, without the protection of glazes, in his Portrait of the St Adrian Civic Guard, Haarlem from 1630. As a result of fading of the indigo, what were originally bright blue sashes have become almost white, as shown in the detail below.

Frans Hals’ Officers and Sergeants of the St Adrian Civic Guard (1633) not only shows the same group of men, but has suffered exactly the same fate with their formerly blue sashes.

Hals’ Militia Company of District XI under the Command of Captain Reynier Reael (1633-37) shows a group known as the Meagre Company. He was commissioned to paint this in 1633, but three years later it remained unfinished, and the commission was transferred to Codde to complete the right side of the canvas and many of the hands and faces a year later.

Painted a decade later, Rembrandt’s vast group portrait of The Night Watch (1642) is perhaps the most famous of them all, although it’s more correctly titled Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. It features the commander and seventeen members of his civic guard company in Amsterdam, and took the artist three years to complete from his first commission to paint this for display in the great hall of the guards.

Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (in black with a red sash), followed by his lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch (in yellow with a white sash) are leading out this militia company, their colours borne by the ensign Jan Visscher Cornelissen. The small girl to the left of them is carrying a dead chicken as a symbol of arquebusiers, the type of weapon several are carrying (detail below).

Some of these militia group portraits commemorated events of greater significance than social occasions. On 15 May 1648, peace between Philip IV of Spain and the Lords States General of the Dutch Republic was finally ratified to end the Eighty Years’ War, and on 18 June this was marked by The Celebration of the Peace of Münster, 18 June 1648, in the Headquarters of the Crossbowmen’s Civic Guard (St George Guard), Amsterdam, painted here by Bartholomeus van der Helst with Jan Vos.

At the right with a silver horn is Captain Cornelis Jansz. Witsen, who is shaking the hand of Lieutenant Johan Oetgens van Waveren. In the centre, seated behind the drum with a flag draped over him, is Reserve Officer Candidate Jacob Banning, and around him are Sergeants Dirck Claesz. Thoveling and Thomas Hartog.

Neighbourhood and welfare organisations also flourished, and the latter distributed money, food, clothes and fuel to the poor. These were run by the middle classes, who formed themselves into regents for the purpose of their administration.

Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck’s Regentesses of the St. Elisabeth’s Hospital (1641) shows the group of august ladies who oversaw that charitable foundation in Haarlem. Time has shown that they too were victims of fugitive pigment, as their tablecloth was originally a rich green. Its unprotected indigo blue has faded from much of its surface, leaving most of it an odd yellow ochre hue.

The gentlemen shown in Frans Hals’ group portrait of the Regents of the Old Men’s Alms House, Haarlem from 1664 were responsible for running the alms house for poor elderly men in the city of Haarlem.

Not everyone in the Dutch Republic enjoyed a Golden Age of material wealth. There were some who found worldly goods and pleasures of the flesh were hollow and fleeting, and expressed that in a new sub-genre of Vanitas.

This stems from a long Christian tradition of the worthlessness of earthly possessions, and the promise of life after death. These are crystallised in the wisdom literature of the Bible, in particular a verse from Ecclesiastes, given in the Latin translation of the Vulgate as vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas, or vanity of vanities, all is vanity, although here the word vanity refers to feelings of emptiness and futility, rather than conceit.

Vanitas paintings thus point to:

• the brevity of life on earth,
• the imminence of death,
• the worthlessness of earthly riches,
• the futility of earthly pursuits and pleasures.

Because those are abstract concepts, the challenge in every Vanitas painting is to find the right symbols, generally accomplished through an allegorical language. They also overlap with other themes in painting such as the Memento mori, the reminder of one’s own mortality.

These have their origins in the Flemish Renaissance, as in Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s Vanitas from about 1535-40. This features an unusual androgynous angel with butterfly wings, cradling a human skull with fragmentary Latin inscriptions. Within the skull is an inset window, through which there is a tiny landscape view. This artist started his career in Antwerp, and is thought to have moved to Haarlem after 1550.

When Vanitas paintings first became popular in the Dutch Republic, they were most commonly expressed in carefully composed still lifes. Clara Peeters’ Fruit, Dead Birds and a Monkey (1615-20) shows a typically strange collection of objects: at first glance a basket of fruit, but the grapes are covered with bloom, a peach is going rotten, and there is a fly on an apple. The little monkey, busy feeding from nuts, is gazing at a small pile of dead birds.

These became elaborate and contrived at times, and sometimes involved a self-portrait.

In Peeters’ Vanitas Portrait of a Woman, the artist gazes into the distance, probably a carefully-angled mirror to see her own reflection. Beside her head is a bubble, a sign of Vanitas. In front of her, on the table, are the contents of a still life, with the worldly symbols of Vanitas: gold and silver coins, jewellery, a couple of dice, with their association with chance and earthly pleasures such as gambling.

In Cornelis de Vos’s Allegory on Transitoriness (1620-29), a mother, possibly the artist’s wife, sits looking full of Vanitas, as her two children blow soap bubbles. Around her, the family’s most valuable possessions are piled up: gold, silver, porcelain, a lute, a string of pearls and other jewellery, and the younger child’s foot rests on a sack of cash. De Vos was Flemish, with his workshop in Antwerp, and often collaborated with Peter Paul Rubens.

Carstian Luyckx, another Flemish painter from Antwerp, brings in additional objects to his undated Allegory of Charles I of England and Henrietta of France in a Vanitas Still Life. These include a globe representing the physical world, the gall from a tree, a snuffed-out candle, seashells, and coral. He uses another common device found in Vanitas painting: an open book, here showing King Charles I, who was executed in 1649, and his wife Henrietta Maria of France, who was deposed as queen of England by the civil wars, forcing her to flee to France in 1644.

David Bailly’s Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols (1651) is a complex web of allegory containing multiple portraits referring to the past. The figure shows him as a much younger man, holding the maulstick he used in painting. His true self-portrait at the time is in the painting held with his left hand. Next to that is a painting of his wife, who had already died, and a ghostly image of her is projected onto the wall behind the wine glass.

Gathered in front of the artist are ephemera and other Vanitas objects: the snuffed-out candle, a glass of wine, flowers, and soap bubbles, together with a string of pearls and a skull. If that message isn’t clear enough, he provides the quotation on a piece of paper: vanitas vanitum et omnia vanitas, together with his signature and date. This painting is also unusual for its innovative use of colour and monochrome passages to distinguish its features from their ground. Bailly worked in the city of the Dutch Republic that became most strongly associated with Vanitas painting, Leiden.

Gerard ter Borch’s younger half-sister Gesina modelled for some of his paintings and trained as a painter herself. Between 1667-69, brother and sister painted this Memorial Portrait of Moses ter Borch (1645-1667) to commemorate their younger brother Moses, also a promising artist, who was killed in the Second Anglo-Dutch War in the summer of 1667. Centred on his full-length posthumous portrait, he’s surrounded by Vanitas symbols, including a snake, butterfly, watch, a small pipe, armour, an hourglass, a skull, shells, weapons, snails, fungal decay, and withering flowers. The ter Borchs worked from Amsterdam, although Gerard seems to have travelled more widely.

Evert Collier’s A Vanitas from 1669 is another collection, showing additional objects which became involved in the allegory, including a sword, armour, fine fabrics, and ornamental feathers. Collier was born in North Brabant, trained in Haarlem, then moved to Leiden.

Some later Vanitas paintings developed the theme of young boys blowing bubbles, as in Karel Dujardin’s Boy Blowing Soap Bubbles, an Allegory on the Transitoriness and Brevity of Life from 1663. Dujardin worked in Amsterdam.