Dutch painters of the 1600s worked for a market, not for the church, and that market mostly wanted ordinary scenes. Several pictures on this page hide a second story under that ordinary surface: a dissection that starts in the wrong place, a self-portrait with another face painted out beneath it.
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How These Were Chosen
In the Dutch Republic of the 1600s, the Calvinist church kept images out of its services, so painters sold to private homes. Not only rich ones: in 1640, the English traveler Peter Mundy saw pictures beside blacksmiths' forges and in cobblers' stalls.
By the 1650s, some 650 to 700 painters were at work in the Republic. In a market that crowded, painters specialized, so a buyer knew what he was paying for: a portrait, a scene of home life, a landscape, a still life, a sea piece.
The twelve paintings here follow those specialties, and each is among the best-known pictures of its kind. Bible stories and myths stayed out, even though Amsterdam homes owned plenty of them. The order runs from the least known to the most famous.
12. Willem van de Velde the Younger, The Cannon Shot (about 1680)
Smoke drifts from the side of a Dutch warship that has just fired a cannon, and on the windless sea its sails hang slack. Two smaller sloops float on either side of it, and far off a second Dutch warship waits with its sails lowered. The shot is a salute. Willem van de Velde the Younger made the picture in about 1680, and he made it in England.
How a Dutch painter came to be working there goes back to 1672, the year the Dutch call the Rampjaar, the disaster year. French armies had invaded Holland, and England was at war with the Republic again. In June, Charles II of England promised religious freedom and tax advantages to Dutch emigrants who crossed the sea, and in the winter of 1672 to 1673 Van de Velde and his father left Amsterdam.
In England, father and son became royal employees. From 1674, Willem van de Velde the Elder received 100 pounds a year "for taking & making Draughts of Sea fights," and the son the same sum for turning those drawings into paintings in color. The family also got a studio in the Queen's House at Greenwich.
That position makes The Cannon Shot more curious once it is set beside its companion piece, known as The Gust. In The Gust, a British warship of 70 guns struggles through a sudden squall with one of its masts broken. Hung side by side, the pair gives the calm and the ceremony to the Dutch ship and the broken mast to the British one. It is an odd split for a painter in English service, and no document explains it.
At a Glance
Artist: Willem van de Velde the Younger (1633 to 1707)
Painted: About 1680
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 78.5 × 67 cm (30.9 × 26.4 in)
Where to see it: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
11. Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632)
In the middle of the canvas, forceps lift the muscles of a dead man's left forearm while seven surgeons in white collars crowd in to watch. The man holding the forceps is the only one wearing a hat. He is Nicolaes Tulp, the physician who taught anatomy to the Amsterdam surgeons' guild, and the body is Aris Kindt, a thief from Leiden hanged that January.
When the guild ordered this picture from Rembrandt, then 25, it knew exactly what an anatomy portrait was supposed to look like. The one he delivered in 1632 looked like none of the pictures it already owned.