Over the past five years, if you were willing to do a little traveling, you could have learned an enormous amount about seventeenth-century Northern European painting, right here in the U.S.A. I’m thinking of the astonishing sequence of such exhibitions as the Anthony van Dyck survey in Washington, “The Age of Rubens” in Boston, “Rembrandt, Not Rembrandt” at the Met, and, most recently, the National Gallery’s Johannes Vermeer retrospective, immediately followed by the present study of his compatriot and contemporary, “Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller.”[1] The list reads like the description of an old-style seminar—“Problems in Dutch and Flemish Baroque: Through a close analysis of the work of key artists from a crucial period in the Low Countries’ history, the artists’ formations and influences, individual and shared qualities, both unique and typical of the period, will be revealed a ...

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