Looking at 17th-Century Dutch Painting

The seventeenth-century Dutch paintings housed at Princeton include, in addition to traditional history subjects and commissioned portraits, many of the novel types of pictures—independent landscapes and marines, still lifes, and genre scenes—that were created for the open market and avidly collected by the newly independent people of the Dutch Republic. Characterized by their relatively small scale and naturalistic style, these images also often conjured up associations to contemporary viewers that may no longer be apparent to us today. In this online exhibition, we encourage you to explore the range of styles, virtuosic brushwork, and possible meanings embedded in these intimate works of art.