Amsterdam and the Dutch Golden Age: Light, Water and Rembrandt

Rembrandt's largest and most famous canvas was painted for the hall of the Arquebusiers, one of the companies of Amsterdam's civic guard, the city's militia and police.¹

The Rijksmuseum explains what made it new: Rembrandt was the first to paint the figures in a group portrait actually doing something. The captain, in black, tells his lieutenant to start the company marching while the guardsmen fall into formation. Light picks out details such as the captain's gesturing hand and a young girl in the background, the company's mascot.¹

Amsterdam itself became a subject. Painters such as Gerrit Berckheyde painted its canals and the grand houses along them.

In Dutch landscapes, the sky often plays a starring role. Jacob van Ruisdael painted fields again and again: twenty-seven of his views of fields survive. In Wheat Fields, he builds an imposing vision of cultivated nature from land, sky and sea, with towering clouds adding their own drama and a glimpse of boats linking the scene to the wider world.²

The same quiet light fills the interiors of Johannes Vermeer, whose fame later tempted a notorious forger, as we told in the forger who fooled the Nazis.