Canal Landscape is a major, high quality example of the early work of Aelbert Cuyp, one of the distinguished classes’ favorite painters, who flooded Dutch landscape paintings with shepherds, cattle and a golden light that would give them a southern air. Northern Europe also offered exotic motifs. Jacob van Ruisdael and Salomon van Ruysdael dominated the art of filling landscape depictions with intense Scandinavian-looking atmospheres, as can be seen in the dramatic Wooded Landscape with Waterfall and Approaching Storm by Ruisdael and Ruysdael’s idyllic River Landscape with Ferry .

Most Dutch painters created numerous small cabinet pieces often painted on copper plate. Many paintings adorned the walls of bourgeois homes in Holland, but particularly valuable works had their own place: they were either stored in especially designed storage furniture from which they were taken out for presentation or they were permanently installed in so-called art cabinets, richly decorated pieces of furniture that in turn were opened only to select visitors. In the center of this section of the exhibition a smaller exhibition space houses a selection of these jewel-like cabinet pieces.

Portraits
Portraits served a social function to a greater extent than other genres, since they represented the status of the figures represented, as well as their social and family ties. One of the peculiarities of Dutch painting during the Golden Age were the group portraits that reflected individuals depicted on the basis of their activity, e.g., members of civilian militias or the surgeons guild.

However, most Dutch portraits were made for the family sphere. In the seventeenth century, it was customary to order double portraits (pendant) or replicas of portraits on the occasion of an engagement or wedding. After several years of marriage, couples also commissioned portraits to strengthen their link, visibly and subsequently transmit this to their heirs, so that over time, galleries of ancestors were formed in bourgeois homes that attested to a family’s antiquity as well as its social advancement and prosperity.

Since the demand for portraits was ample and unceasing, each city had specialized portraitists. This section displays masterpieces by two of the main exponents: Frans Hals, the most famous portraitist in Haarlem, who adeptly characterized his models in brushstrokes with an almost abstract effect, and Rembrandt, the coveted history painter who conquered the Amsterdam portrait market in the 1630s and experimented with unusual poses.

Among the highlights of this genre are the anonymous ladies by both Johannes Verspronck, a guild member and probable apprentice to Frans Hals, and Nicolaes Maes, a disciple of Rembrandt’s and one of the main representatives of a new courtly portrait style in the northern Netherlands. The attention and care devoted to ornamental details can be appreciated in Verspronck’s Portrait of a Woman in a Chair , while Maes’ exceptional Portrait of a Woman in Black Dress includes a view of a landscape that thus links it to the Flemish tradition introduced by Anton van Dyck and represented the ambitions of citizens who yearned for a aristocratic lifestyle.

Head of a Bearded Man in Oriental Costume by painter Arie de Vois of Leiden, another masterpiece in the exhibition, is a typical example of tronie, a type of representation masterfully cultivated by Rembrandt and Frans Hals, among others, in which the model’s individuality was subordinated to the affection expressed.

Just as family portraits often reflected a family’s economic well-being through its dress or stately interiors, children’s portraits had a special charm, since the somewhat rigid representation of adults aware of their social status contrasts with the casual air and joy in these paintings. The Portrait of Susanna de Vos , Daughter of the Painter by history painter Cornelis de Vos of Antwerp, the only Flemish artist to specialize in children’s portraits in the early years of the 1620s and 1635, depicts the girl sitting in her baby chair happily swinging her feet while looking at the viewer.

Genre painting and interiors
Genre paintings put the finishing touches on the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s exhibition of Dutch and Flemish painting from the Golden Age. As examples of depraved life, smokers and drinkers are two of the favorite motifs in seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting and beloved by prosperous bourgeois who, because of their social status as well as cultivated education, distanced themselves from these amoral behaviors.

As a mode of depiction, the scenes and protagonists could and had to be unpleasant, which is why the protagonists of these pictures were often farmers and individuals from lower social strata, following the rules of commedia.

A prime initiator of genre painting was Pieter Bruegel the Elder. In turn, Adriaen Brouwer, who had worked for a season with Frans Hals in Haarlem before returning to his native Flanders, disseminated these rough themes in both north and south. Drunken Peasant and the famous The Bitter Drink , a work of great technical virtuosity depicting a farmer and his contorted face, are outstanding examples of the genre. His fame at the time is attested to by the multiple copies and graphic painted reproductions that were made of it until the mid-twentieth century.

In Antwerp, David Teniers the Younger carried on the family tradition; he married Bruegel’s granddaughter and before working as a court painter for Archduke Leopold-Wilhelm in Brussels, he was especially and preferentially devoted to painting scenes of peasants, fairs and taverns. The exhibition contains a number of his most important works, such as Two Peasants Smoking at a Coal Fire and Smoker at an Inn.

In Holland, this genre—considered of low status—was above all practiced by painters from Haarlem such as Jan Miense Molenaer, whose famous work Man Smoking and Holding an Empty Wineglass can be seen in the exhibition; Adriaen van Ostade, who introduced elements of barn scenes in this genre; and his disciples Cornelis Bega and Cornelis Dusart.

These artists all had in common loose brushstrokes in which the lines remained visible. This somewhat “rough” and untidy manner seemed well-suited to themes of low moral and social status in which Jan Steen, a Leiden-born painter and pupil of landscape painter Jan van Goyen, achieved a special mastery. His famous works Tavern Scene and The Alchemist showcase his contemporaries’ vices and defects with a biting irony and sympathy.

Woman with Wineglass , by Gerard ter Borch, Woman Setting the Dinner Table by Gerrit Dou and Roman Tinker by Jan Baptist Weenix as well as the exquisite representation of Interior with Painter, Woman Reading and Maid Sweeping by Pieter Janssen Elinga are other outstanding examples of masterpieces featured in this section of the exhibition.