This also inspired his brother Isaac van Ostade, who soon created his own category in which he depicted the colourful goings-on of the beggars, the wagoners and the travellers in front of the picturesque inns and post stations on the large military roads. He had a good eye for the landscape and also a knack for showing the typical winter joy of the Dutch at skating on the frozen streams and canals. He apparently also associated with the approximately same-aged Philips Wouwerman, who created, above all, very lively landscapes with hunting groups and rider scenes.
A further famous painter of the times is Jan Steen, who took Frans and Dirk Hals as his models. Steen liked to laugh; presenting laughter in its numerous forms was one of his main tasks. He took his motifs wherever he found them, and for this he sought out the most disreputable localities, whose events he painted quite unconcernedly, sometimes even crudely or objectionably. In his observation of the lives of the so-called “better” people, he developed into a imaginative satirist who has been compared, not unjustly, with his great contemporary, the actor, theatre director and, finally, dramatist Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, who called himself Molière. His artistically accomplished works are characterizations from the lives of the middle classes such as the Menagerie of the chicken coop of a noble estate, or the Wedding Contract. On the same level of artistic accomplishment is the famous inn picture known as the Parrot Cage (third quarter of seventeenth century).
The third of the great Dutch genre painters, Gerard Terborch the Younger, also belonged to the circle of Frans Hals. Although he was a pupil of the London-born landscape painter Pieter Molyn, he found his inspiration more with Frans Hals and the social painters of his school. Terborch the Younger was also attracted to depictions of guardrooms with soldiers and officers, but still more to the unfettered life of the officers who dallied with their girls or maids and were only disturbed from their revelry when a messenger brought a more or less important message. One such scene is illustrated in one of the most famous of these genre pictures of Terborch. It was mistakenly assumed by the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to be a copper engraving of a Fatherly Rebuke (1655), but is rather the infatuated conversation of an elderly suitor with a young beauty. Terborch painted many such pictures which excited the imagination of the viewer with their ambiguity.
Also, as a portraitist, Terborch was always the “king of the cabinet piece”. After a short stay in Amsterdam he went to Münster, where he was an adviser to the delegates of the warring parties. Here, where there were hundreds of statesmen, spiritual and worldly dignitaries, diplomatic agents, law experts, and other great figures of the time, he found ample opportunities to demonstrate his expertise as a portraitist. Portraits of single persons or large groups, such as the Peace Treaty of Münster (1648), are magnificent examples of his talent. Terborch was the Grand Master of Dutch painting, which began to show signs of decline soon after his death on the 8th of December 1681.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was initially directed by his father to seek a scholarly career, but was able to assert himself and was finally allowed to follow his aptitude for painting. He was barely able to follow this ambition in Leyden, a city in which trade, business and scholarship were of higher value than art. Rembrandt served his apprenticeship with the Italian-inclined Jacob van Swanenburgh, who in turn had studied under Adam Elsheimer in Rome. Adam Elsheimer tended above all towards Caravaggio and painted mostly biblical and mythological subjects in small formats. But Rembrandt had little feel for this direction.
Rembrandt only returned to Leyden in 1623 and trained himself; totally released from the ideal of the academician, he selected Nature as his teacher and then relied on his own observations. Besides quill and pencil, his first method of expression was quickly and surely the etching needle. The first spark of his genius was not in his paintings but his etchings. While his earliest known paintings St. Paul in Prison (1627) and The Moneychanger (1327) (pp. 82, 83) are clearly his first forays into the medium, his etchings of the period show that in this art he had reached absolute mastery some years earlier. One such masterwork of etching in which the strongest effects were achieved with the simplest means is Rembrandt’s Mother (1628).
Etchings played a large part in the artistic career of Rembrandt. For him they were not a reproductive but a self-creative art form. What he could not or did not wish to express quickly enough with the brush, he trusted to his etching needle. For this reason, his art can only be appreciated in its full scope when, in addition to the 300 to 350 paintings he left behind, one adds the almost 1000 drawings and also the approximately 300 etchings in which he expressed his thoughts.
After overcoming his first difficulties, Rembrandt’s painting capabilities developed themselves quickly. The year 1631 brought forth the magnificent Holy Family, a painting of great accomplishment. It shows his complete independence and his fundamental realistic concept of nature but also his quest to explain and idealize nature through the magic of life and colour. In this combination of simple nature with a high idealism of colouristic expression lies the essence of the artistic importance of Rembrandt. At the end of 1631, he decided to leave Leyden and to seek a wider field of activity in Amsterdam. His painting now began an approximately twelve-year period of free artistic creation that resulted in a long series of masterworks.