Animal Satire

Cornelis Saftleven - An Enchanted Cellar with Animals - c. 1655 - 1670 - Black and red chalk, gray and brown wash, and watercolor - 10 1/8 x 12 5/8 in. - Getty Center, Los Angeles (click photo for larger image)Dutch Baroque era artist Cornelis Saftleven was the most successful of a family of artists. He became best known for painting genre scenes of peasants and satirical pictures of animals dressed and acting like theologians and jurists. He also did landscapes with sheep and cattle grazing.

Vermeer: A Moment in Time

Jan Vermeer - View of Delft - c. 1660-1661 - Oil on canvas - 96.5 x 115.7 cm (38 x 45 9/16 in.) - Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis, The Hague (click photo for larger image)Dutch painter Jan Vermeer (1632-1675) is most widely known for his domestic interior scenes, which reveal a great deal about the Dutch middle class of the day. However, he also created some exquisite exterior scenes, such as the work featured here. Note the amazing colors and meticulous attention to detail. Vermeer’s work was never in motion. Rather, he became famous for capturing moments—both inside and outside.

Johan Barthold Jongkind

Johan Barthold Jongkind - In Holland; Boats near the Mill, 1868, Musée d'Orsay, Paris (click photo for larger image)Dutch Impressionist painter Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819-1891) painted marine landscapes (in both Holland and France) in a free manner and is regarded as a forerunner of Impressionism. His paintings are characterized by vigorous brushwork and strong contrasts. Like the 17th-century Dutch landscape painters, he typically composed his landscapes with a low horizon, allowing the sky to dominate.

Carel Fabritius

Carel Fabritius - View of the City of Delft - 1652 - Oil on canvas, 15,4 x 31,6 cm - National Gallery, London (click photo for larger image)Dutch Baroque-era artist Carel Fabritius (1622-1654) was Rembrandt’s most outstanding student. The View of the City of Delft  (from where Johannes Vermeer also hailed) with the stall of a dealer in musical instruments suggests that Fabritius, like other contemporary Dutch painters, made use of a camera obscura. This small painting is also the only known visual evidence of the artist's famous expertise in the use of linear perspective. A man bearing some resemblance to the artist himself sits at a table beside a weathered wall. It is now generally agreed that this painting was meant to be displayed in a special viewing case or "perspective box", a distinctively Dutch art form. In addition, most scholars agree that the canvas must have been mounted originally on a bent or curved surface.

Rachel Ruysch: A Master of Floral Delicacy

Rachel Ruysch - Flowers, Fruit, and Insects - 1716 - Oil on canvas, 89 x 60 cm - Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence (click photo for larger image)Jan van Huysum - Fruit and Flowers - c. 1720 - Oil on panel, 81 x 60 cm - Wallace Collection, London. Notice the lighter background in this work. (click photo for larger image)Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750) was a Dutch still-life painter who, with Jan van Huysum (1642-1749), also featured here, was the most celebrated exponent of flower pieces of her period. The daughter of a botanist and the pupil of artist Willem van Aelst, she worked mainly in her native Amsterdam, but also in The Hague (1701-08) and Düsseldorf, where from 1708 to 1716 she was court painter to the Elector Palatine.

Her richly devised bouquets were painted in delicate colors with meticulous detail, and their artistry and craftsmanship are worthy of the finest tradition of Dutch flower painting. She continued to use the dark backgrounds characteristic of Van Aelst and the older generation long after Van Huysum and other contemporaries had gone over to light backgrounds.

Ruysch lived eighty-five years and her dated works establish that she painted from the time she was a young woman until she was an octogenarian. However, only about a hundred paintings by her are known. Possibly she worked slowly, however as the wife of a portraitist, Juriaen Pool (1666-1745), and the mother of ten children, she may also have had a limited amount of time for painting!