Existing comment:
European Art -- Society Depicted: Portraiture & Genre Painting in 17th-Century Northern Europe:
During the 17th century, artists in Holland and Belgium were engaged as never before in creating portraits and scenes of daily life (also called genre paintings). While artists such as Peter Paul Rubens or Rembrandt van Rijn sought to transcend everyday experience in their paintings, other artists used portraits and genre paintings to explore ideas about the society in which they were created. Developments in portraiture were spurred by the increasingly wealthy and powerful mercantile classes as well as the aristocracy, who sought images that both captured a faithful likeness and expressed something of the sitter's character. The most successful portrait artists, such as Gerald Ter Borch, were those who exploited all aspects of the portrait -- gesture, expression, and setting -- to capture those ideals that best characterized the behavior and manners of the sitter in a positive way. Such paintings go beyond simply recording appearance to present individuals as embodiments of the collective values of the society to which they belonged.
In genre scenes, which depicted anonymous characters, artists used allegory rather than the example of a known sitter to represent the values that governed public life. For example, Jan Miense Molenaer's masterpiece of allegorical painting employs complex imagery and symbolism to transform a simple scene of a musical group into an intricate illustration of the harmony of marriage. Images of the contemporary world were vital tools in navigating the social fabric of Baroque Europe. As we consider such paintings from a modern perspective, our delight comes not only from their artistic mastery but also from the glimpses they offer of the society that produced them. |