This period produced many great Dutch colourists: among them, Pieter Claesz, Willem Claesz Heda, Willem van (or de) Aelst, Willem Kalf and, above all, the whole de Heem painter family. Their most important member, Jan Davidszoon de Heem, was one of the main masters of the vanitas still-lifes with yellow-brown tones. After 1635, he painted images of flowers and fruit. Not the whole scope, but yet a great part of his knowledge and his extraordinary expertise in pictorial grouping was incorporated in Large Still-Life with Bird’s Nest (early-mid seventeenth century) in which, in front of a ruined building, he heaped up the most delicate fruits surrounded by swarms of birds, wasps, ants and lizards. After Jan Davidszoon de Heem, his son Cornelis de Heem and especially Jan van Huysun can be named as masters in the unmatched reproduction of bouquets of roses in baskets or vases such as Flowers and Fruit (early eighteenth century).
Regarding female painters, Rachel Ruysch could match Davidszoon de Heem in her best works. Even richer than Rachel Ruysch, from a colouristic point of view, was Maria van Oosterwyck, a pupil of Davidszoon de Heem. Among painters, she belonged to the small group of high-income painters, who earned so much with her paintings that she could donate substantial amounts to be used for the freeing of three Dutch sailors held to ransom by Algerian pirates.
Besides this painting in the Dutch direction, there is a group of Italian-influenced painters who have remained largely unknown and of whom only three or four were of any importance. Gerritt van Honthorst went to Rome in 1620, where Caravaggio became his model. He painted single figures and whole scenes from folk life, mostly by yellow-red flickering candlelight. His pictures had an even greater effect in Germany and it is quite possible that even Rembrandt learned from him.
Two other painters must be mentioned besides Pieter Lastman and Jacob van Swanenburgh, who were pupils of Rembrandt. One is Cornelis van Poelenburgh who liked to populate his fine, ideally composed landscapes with naked, smooth as porcelain, nymphs, and the other is Pieter van Laer who, after a study trip through France, settled for approximately fifteen years in Rome. His pictorial discoveries were not abandoned there. He liked best to paint antique ruins, collapsed buildings and suspicious haunts. For this, as in Roman Rabble in the Monastery Courtyard, he collected a group of all types of beggars, crooks, and robbers to model for him.
The more pleasant sides of Italian life were painted by Nicolaes Berchem and Jan Both. Berchem’s landscapes were a mirror of Italian country life, and were enlivened with peasants, shepherds, horses, cattle and sheep such as the Landscape with antique Ruins. In contrast, Jan Both often worked with his brother, who painted the figures into Jan’s landscapes. His emphasis was on the effects that the colour could obtain in the full shining of the light; a fine example of this is Evening Landscape (early seventeenth century).
Among the tail end of the Dutch school was Adriaen van der Werff with his portraits. His biblical and mythological depictions made him well-known, and he became the Court Painter, of Johann Wilhelm and was knighted by him. He was able to satisfy the artistic ideals of his contemporaries and some of his pictures, such as The Repudiation of Hagar (1697), will always be a considered a masterwork of fine painting.
In the Southern Netherlands, whose borders correspond somewhat with present-day Belgium, there lived a mixed population made up of French-Walloon and Flemish parts which naturally had a corresponding influence on the character of painting. Added to this, there was the dominating spiritual force of Catholicism, which fostered a view of religion in the spirit of the Jesuits, while the popularity of religious painting in the northern provinces soon disappeared completely or languished in domestic remembrance pictures. Despite the different political, religious and social outlooks, painting in both parts of the Netherlands was just as well practised as the genre pictures and all other forms of painting.
This Grand Master of Flemish painting is one of the most recognizable figures in the history of art. His father was a lay judge who had fled from Antwerp to Siegen for political reasons. There his son Peter Paul was born; he attended the Jesuit school in Cologne and returned with his mother to Antwerp. From 1591 to 1598 Rubens became a pupil of the relatively unknown painter Tobias Verhaecht, as well as Adam van Noort and Otto van Veen. The former two still incorporated the somewhat gruff local school into their teachings, so that Rubens associated himself more with the humanistically trained Van Veen while moving more in the direction of the Italian style.
His stay in Italy from May 1600 to October 1608 showed Rubens as creatively active, evidenced by his quick promotion in Venice to Court Painter by the Duke of Mantua. From here he made several journeys to Rome and carried out altar commissions, such as saints in veneration in front of a picture of the Madonna and Child in a halo (1608) – for the Church of Santa Maria in Vallicella. On a commission from the Duke he travelled not only to the Spanish Court but also, in the retinue of the Duke, to Florence, Milan and Genoa.
Rubens was called back to Antwerp by the death of his mother. He left Italy reluctantly with the fixed intention of returning shortly. But, with many commissions and honours from the governing couple of the Netherlands, the Archduke Albrecht VII and his wife Isabella, his work bound him to his home as did his marriage in 1609 to Isabella Brandt. The couple’s features, which presumably he showed for the first time in his double portrait Self-Portrait with Isabella Brandt (1609-1610) look out from this time up to the end of the 1620s from almost all of his pictures, including numerous Saint and Madonna pictures. This happiness lasted until Isabella’s death in 1626. Only at the start of the 1630s, after he entered a second marriage with the 16-year-old Helena Fourment, did a new ideal of beauty appear in Rubens’ art.