The Dutch paintings of the Netherlands’ seventeenth-century Golden Age are one of the world’s great artistic treasures. Landscapes are among its brightest jewels. Thanks to her profligate but discerning ancestral uncle George IV, formerly the Prince Regent, Her Majesty Elizabeth II, Queen of England, has a very fine collection of them. In “Dutch Landscapes” are to be found much of the best work of Aelbert Cuyp, Philip Wouwermans, Meyndert Hobbema, and Paulus Potter, the Ruysdaels, and the van der Veldes.
The pleasure to be gained from these finely observed and rendered scenes of sea and dike, trees and rigging, dune and polder, and the sails of ship and windmill is immense, but is there anything new to say about them? It is here that the exhibition succeeds, for it places the pictures in their social and religious context. The Netherlands, particularly that most Protestant province of Holland, was, in the seventeenth century, the world’s first modern trading, capitalist country—the forerunner of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, which in turn handed the baton to America, where it now rests. In the course of the seventeenth century the Dutch built 400,000 seaworthy vessels, and by 1670 they owned half of all the tonnage of European shipping. Their traders ranged from Surinam to Sumatra, from New Amsterdam (whatever became of that city?) to Nagasaki. Their descendants are still to be found in Cape Town, Curaçao, and Colombo. They were the pepper-merchants and cloth-bleachers of Europe.
There were no princely patrons in