Art in the Dutch Golden Age


Excellent course at the National Gallery on painting in the Netherlands in the 17th century.

This course ran over three Saturday mornings and was led by Chantal Brotherton-Ratcliffe. She is a very engaging speaker and seemed delighted that a course which was due to be run for a small group in the seminar room had to be moved to the lecture hall because of numbers.

Week one looked at portraits and went through the reasons people commissioned portraits and the different styles. She had wonderful photographs with lots of good details. In doing this she also went though the reasons why there was such a high demand for art in this period.

Week 2 was genre painting and we had a romp through the various subjects with interesting insights into their symbolism. I often find these work’s quite a turn off in galleries as there are acres of them but now I know a bit more about them I will look more carefully and I’ve already had a walk round the Wallace Collection’s collection.

Finally we looked at how the studios worked and why some artists were more successful that others. We looked at how named artists were often a brand with much of the work being done by assistants. She had a good analysis of artists who had trained with Rembrandt and how their styles changed when they moved out of the studio. We also looked at why Vermeer was not successful in his left time, partly as he was slow and used expensive pigments.

All in all an excellent course which left me with lots of new things to investigate.

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