This book introduces teachers of middle school students and up to seventeenth-century Dutch culture and its early influence in North America. Three introductory chapters, “Profile of the Dutch Republic,” “A Golden Age for the Arts,” and “Life in the City and Countryside,” provide an overview. Next
are five sections on the types of painting strongly associated with Dutch art of the Golden Age: “Landscape Painting,” “Genre Painting,” “Still-Life Painting,”
“Portraiture,” and “History Painting.” Dutch paintings of the time presumably offer snapshots of what Dutch life was like, but in fact they contained
an equal measure of reality and artifice. Dutch artists broke with conventions and took liberties to create images that reflected their republic’s socially conservative, yet worldly, aspirations. The result was a vast body of work enormously original in approach and varied in subject matter.
Dutch artists also continued efforts, begun during the Renaissance, to elevate the status of art beyond its associations with lesser trades and to restructure the guild system. Patrons and artists discussed the fine points of composition, technique, and ways in which art engaged the attentions of the viewer. This connoisseurship (addressed in the section “Talking about Pictures”) spurred the founding of specialized art academies and a new “business”
of art.

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