Patronage is bad for art, particularly for paintings. Whether they come in the form of commissions for churches or by the powerful and wealthy, paintings to please others are inevitably constrained by what those others want to see. Until the seventeenth century, there were remarkably few depictions of ordinary, everyday people. Then, at about the same time, that changed in paintings by the likes of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682) in Spain, and the Brueghel family and David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690) in Brabant to the south of the Dutch Republic. In the Dutch Golden Age such paintings rose to popularity, and must have graced the walls of many Dutch homes. This article looks at a small selection of those that have survived.

Portraits of women washing linen first became popular in Dutch and Flemish ‘cabinet’ paintings, such as Gabriël Metsu’s Washerwoman (c 1650), along with other scenes of household and similar activities. This painting appears authentic and almost socially realist: the young woman appears to be a servant, dressed in her working clothes, with only her forearms bare, and her head covered. She’s in the dark and dingy lower levels of the house, and hanging up by her tub is a large earthenware vessel used to draw water. She looks tired, her eyes staring blankly at the viewer.

Metsu’s Kitchen Maid from 1656 is preparing a trussed-up chicken to be roasted on a metal skewer over an open fire. Behind her, hanging from a hook, is a small furry mammal probably intended to be a rabbit, although it worryingly looks more like a very large cat. Below it in the otherwise empty fireplace is a bowl of what look like potatoes.

Metsu followed his subjects beyond the home, here into The Vegetable Market in Amsterdam in about 1660-61. The mistress stands with a metal pail on her arm, detached from the housekeeper to the left of centre, who is bargaining with one of the vendors. Other figures are drawn from a broad range of classes, and there’s produce ranging from cauliflowers to chickens.

His Woman Selling Herring (c 1661-62) is going from door to door with her fish, here trying to convince an old woman standing with a stick at the door of her dilapidated cottage.

Out in the country, Metsu finds The Pancake Baker with a Boy (1655-58), again with fascinating detail. The cook in her roadside tent offers an impressive menu, with fish being supervised by a watchful cat, pancakes cooked to order from the batter in the earthenware pot by the woman’s left leg, and a few apples. Her trade seems to extend to shellfish too, with what appears to be a lobster peering from a wickerwork basket on the table, and a couple of empty mussel shells underneath it. This is the Dutch equivalent of the Spanish bodegone, popular in the earlier years of the century, and successfully painted by Velázquez early in his career.

Several of Vermeer’s masterpieces depict ordinary people in everyday life, among them his Milkmaid from about 1658-1661.

A maid is pouring milk from a jug, beside a tabletop with bread. In the left foreground the bread and pots rest on a folded Dutch octagonal table, covered with a mid-blue cloth. A wicker basket of bread is nearest the viewer, broken and smaller pieces of different types of bread behind and towards the woman, in the centre. Behind the bread is a dark blue studded mug with pewter lid, and just in front of the woman a brown earthenware ‘Dutch oven’ pot into which she is pouring milk.

Figures in the animal paintings of Paulus Potter and Gerard ter Borch were also thoroughly ordinary.

Paulus Potter’s Peasant Family with Animals (1646) shows a family with a curiously grotesque young daughter, their cottage, and some wizened trees.

Potter was reticent about showing milkmaids, though. In his Cows Grazing at a Farm, painted in 1653, the year before his early death, the milkmaid is almost hidden by the cow’s hindquarters.

Gerard ter Borch was prepared to put the milkmaid and her cow at the centre of this painting, A Maid Milking a Cow in a Barn from about 1652-54. As was universal at the time, milk was collected in a wooden bucket.

Isaac Koedijck is a bit more unusual in his Surgeon Tending a Peasant’s Foot (1649-50), with its wooden spiral staircase and collection of weapons and tools mounted high on the wall.

It’s easy to mistake Pieter de Hooch’s A Woman Drinking with Two Men from about 1658 for a Vermeer, and like the latter he decorates the far wall with a contemporary map. The Eighty Years’ War had not long ended, and the Dutch Republic was flourishing. Discarded objects are scattered on its black-and-white tiled floor. There’s a large and empty fireplace, and above it hangs a religious painting.

Finally, Gabriel Metsu’s Old Drinker (c 1650-67) is dressed in clothes almost as old as he is, and clutches a clay tobacco pipe in his right hand, and a pewter drinking tankard with his left.

How many of those paintings would have been commissioned by a patron?

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.