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?

Before the Dutch Golden Age, paintings of everyday life, now widely termed genre paintings, were seldom seen. That changed in the Dutch Republic, when they became among the most popular, if not the majority. Several of the best known artists of this period specialised in them, among them Gerard ter Borch (1617–1681) who made himself something of an international career as a result.

Ter Borch was born in the city of Zwolle, well to the east of Amsterdam. As his father was also an artist with the same name, he’s sometimes distinguished as Gerard ter Borch the Younger. He had already started to travel in 1632, when he was training in Amsterdam, and for the next twenty years or so he painted in England, Germany, France, Spain and Italy.

For the thirty years between 1618-1648, central Europe had been engulfed in a bitter war between the Habsburg states, including the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, and their enemies, including the Dutch Republic. Ter Borch’s magnificent painting of The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 15 May 1648 (1648) recorded the moment that the Thirty Years War ended, with the ratification of this treaty between the Dutch Republic and Spain. It also marked the birth of the Dutch Republic as an independent country.

The artist even seized the opportunity to include himself among the ranks of dignitaries: he is at the far left, with long hair and looking directly at the viewer. Although this may look a large and grand work, ter Borch painted it on copper, and it is little larger than a miniature.

But most of his surviving works are portraits and interior scenes of everyday life.

The Messenger, popularly know as Unwelcome News, from 1653, develops what came to be one of his favourite themes. The young man at the left is still booted and spurred from riding to deliver a message to this couple. Slung over his shoulder is a trumpet, to announce his arrival and importance. The recipient wears a shiny breastplate and riding boots, and is taken aback at the news. His wife leans on her husband’s thigh, her face looking serious.

The scene is the front room of a house in the Golden Age. Behind them is a traditional bed (typical in living areas at the time), with some of their possessions resting on a table between the couple and their bed. Hanging up on a bedpost is the husband’s sword, and behind them is a gun and powder horn. Is the letter news of his recall to military service, perhaps? Will he soon have to ride away from his wife, leaving her to bring up their family?

At about the same time, ter Borch painted A Maid Milking a Cow in a Barn (c 1652-54), incorporating its own still life of everyday farming objects including a winnowing sieve and an axe.

Mother Combing the Hair of Her Child (c 1652-53) shows a regular domestic routine, expressed more bluntly in its alternative title of Hunting for Lice. The mother is looking intently at her young daughter’s hair for traces of lice and nits, and running a fine-tooth comb through it to remove any.

Three Figures Conversing in an Interior (c 1653-55) is another of his narrative genre works, and more popularly known as Paternal Admonition. Standing with her back to us, wearing a plush going-out dress, is the daughter. To her left is a table, on which there is a small reading stand with books, almost certainly including a Bible. Her parents are young, and they too are fashionably dressed. Her mother appears to be drinking from a glass, but her father is at the very least cautioning his daughter, if not giving her a thorough dressing-down. He wears a sword at his side. Behind them is a large bed, and to the right the family dog looks on from the gloom.

Ter Borch’s half-sister Gesina, herself a painter, appears to have been his model for Woman Writing a Letter (c 1655), which makes obvious his connection with Vermeer. Move this woman to a desk lit through windows at the left, light her surroundings, and you have a painting very similar to some of Vermeer’s. This painting shows a heavy decorated table cover pushed back to make room for the quill, inkpot, and letter. Behind the woman is her bed, surrounded by heavy drapery, and at the lower right is the brilliant red flash of the seat.

The Spinner is dated to about 1655, but may well have been the pendant to Mother Combing the Hair of Her Child (c 1652-53), and uses the same model. Here she looks intently at her work, a small dog on her lap.

Long before its value in preventing scurvy was realised in 1747, or it was carbonated even later, still cloudy lemonade had become a popular soft drink. Extensive trade links of the Dutch Republic made this drink available to the middle classes, as celebrated in ter Borch’s The Glass of Lemonade (1655-60).

A fashionably-dressed young man is helping to prepare a glass of lemonade for a young woman, who is equally open about her love of fashionable clothing. Behind her is the woman’s nurse or maid, who is having to comfort her through the excitement of the experience. They’re surrounded by a contemporary Dutch interior, with the inevitable bed lurking in the dark at the right, a small but heavily-built wooden table to the right, and a lighter-weight table at the lower left.

The Letter from about 1660-62 returns to his favourite theme of the reading and writing of letters. Two young women are working together, apparently to write a reply to the letter which is being read by the woman on the right. A boy, perhaps their younger brother, has just brought in a tray bearing an ornate pitcher of drink. In front, a small dog is curled up asleep on a stool.

Ter Borch’s backgrounds become lighter in his later work, as shown in The Music Lesson from about 1668. A teacher stands over a young woman, who is learning to play the lute. By this time, the basic lute had become extended to accommodate additional strings for a wider register. This is often referred to as a theorbo, although in modern terminology it’s probably more of an archlute, and seems to have been fashionable in the Dutch Republic at this time. Resting on the table is a cello, and asleep on a chair is a small dog. Note that the room still contains a bed in the background.

Just as mothers had to check their children for parasites in the hair, so pet owners had to remove fleas from their pets. Ter Borch’s late painting of A Boy with his Dog, also known as The Flea-Catcher (after 1666), shows this, in fairly barren surroundings.

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.

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.