Dutch Golden Age Paintings: 7 Masterpieces and the Stories Behind Them

by Luciano Drehmer October 15, 2026

by Luciano Drehmer Published on October 15, 2026

“Many tymes blacksmithes, Cobblers, ets...will have some picture or another by their Forge and in their stalle,” wrote Peter Mundy, an English traveler in Amsterdam in 1640. Buyers like these kept up the demand for Dutch Golden Age paintings. Painters in the Dutch Republic turned out portraits, city views, household scenes and landscapes for them from about 1588 to 1672. Three of the seven below, The Night Watch, Girl with a Pearl Earring and View of Delft, rank with the famous paintings of any century.

The end date is 1672, the Rampjaar or “disaster year,” when French troops overran most of the Republic’s northern provinces. The seven paintings run in the order they were made, from a Haarlem portrait of 1624 to a river view of about 1670.

Little of this art was made for churches. The average Protestant burgher had no use for ornate religious pictures, and his church was stark and whitewashed. Painters sold to households instead, at fairs, from their studios or through dealers. Few pictures were made to order, and a signature helped a painter’s name stick.

At a glance

#	Painting	Artist	Year	Where to see it (autumn 2026)
1	The Laughing Cavalier	Frans Hals	1624	Wallace Collection, London
2	The Night Watch	Rembrandt van Rijn	1642	Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
3	The Goldfinch	Carel Fabritius	1654	Mauritshuis, The Hague
4	View of Delft	Johannes Vermeer	c. 1660–1661	Mauritshuis, The Hague (on loan to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, until January 10, 2027)
5	Girl with a Pearl Earring	Johannes Vermeer	c. 1665	Mauritshuis, The Hague
6	The Feast of St Nicholas	Jan Steen	1665–1668	Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
7	The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede	Jacob van Ruisdael	c. 1668–1670	Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Haarlem and Amsterdam: portraits that move

01The Laughing Cavalier, Frans Hals (1624)

Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier, 1624 — Hand on hip and hat brim tilted up; the inscription at upper right records his age and the year.
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The man in The Laughing Cavalier is neither laughing nor a cavalier. The catchy title was attached around 1888 and never changed. Hals painted a formal portrait of a dignified gentleman with a faint smile.

He was 26 at the time. He wears the latest French fashions, which only the Dutch elite could get, and his doublet is embroidered with emblems of fortune, strength, love and virtue. Nobody knows his name. He faces left, which suggests a bachelor, since husbands in paired marriage portraits usually turned right, toward their wives.

Look at the black sash across his chest. Hals could do a great deal with a limited palette. “Frans Hals must have had 27 blacks,” Van Gogh exclaimed.

From the 1860s on, Hals’s pictures in the Haarlem museum drew Courbet, Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Sargent and Whistler. They came to study how he handled a brush.

02The Night Watch, Rembrandt van Rijn (1642)

Its official title is Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, the name on the Rijksmuseum’s file for the canvas. The nickname first turns up in a document of 1797. It comes from the thick, dark yellow varnish on the canvas.

Rembrandt had the commission before December 1640, when one of the guardsmen he portrayed died. He signed the finished work “Rembrandt f 1642.” Rembrandt’s Night Watch is his largest picture, more than four and a half meters wide. The City of Amsterdam has lent it to the Rijksmuseum since 1808.

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Night Watch, 1642, the original — The copy follows the original figure for figure, from the captain in black with his red sash and the lieutenant in pale yellow to the lit girl at left and the drummer at right.

Our hand-painted oil reproduction of The Night Watch — The copy follows the original figure for figure, from the captain in black with his red sash and the lieutenant in pale yellow to the lit girl at left and the drummer at right.

Militia portraits usually lined the men up in rows or around a banquet table. Rembrandt, in the Rijksmuseum’s account, was the first to show the figures of a group portrait actually doing something. The captain is ordering his lieutenant to march the company off, and the light picks out his gesturing hand and a young girl behind them. She was the company’s mascot.

A shield beside the gate names 18 men, yet the canvas holds 34 figures, so 16 of them are not portraits of real people. In 1715 the painting moved to the Town Hall on the Dam. Four pieces were cut off so it would fit between two doors, the biggest from the left side, and they have never been found.

It has since survived a knife attack in 1911, twelve cuts in 1975 and acid in 1990. Operation Night Watch, the museum’s research project on the canvas, is the most extensive in the painting’s history. For his other major works, see fifteen Rembrandt paintings in ranked order.

Delft in the 1650s and 1660s

03The Goldfinch, Carel Fabritius (1654)

Carel Fabritius, The Goldfinch, 1654 — A small bird on a feeding box, its chain hanging loose against a pale plaster wall.
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Fabritius trained with Rembrandt in Amsterdam from about 1641 to 1643, then settled in Delft. There his pictures grew far lighter. The Goldfinch is signed “C FABRITIVS 1654” and painted on a small, thick panel sawn from a larger board.

That cut has fed theories about how the panel was first used. It may have been part of a cage, with a painted bird meant to fool the eye. It may also have been a small door to a wall niche, or the door of a cupboard protecting another painting. The low viewpoint, which assumes you are looking up at it, supports the niche idea.

On the wing, Fabritius laid two strokes of yellow over black. He then scratched into the wet paint with the pointed end of his brush, a trick he learned from Rembrandt.

In October 1654 the Delft powder magazine exploded, and Fabritius died of his injuries at 32. No more than twelve of his paintings survive. The Mauritshuis bought the panel at a Paris sale in 1896, and Donna Tartt later built a best-selling novel around it, with the painting on the cover. Two of our articles go further: one on visiting the Goldfinch in The Hague, one on the gunpowder blast that killed Fabritius.

04View of Delft, Johannes Vermeer (c. 1660–1661)

Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft, c. 1660–1661 — Water, city and sky in three horizontal bands, with a dark cloud shading the near quay.
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Vermeer looked at Delft from the southeast, across the Kolk, a triangular harbor at the city’s southern edge. It is a still morning, with the sun in the east.

He tidied the real view. Compared with drawings of the site, his skyline is neater, and the bridge between the Schiedam and Rotterdam Gates is straighter and longer. He also moved the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk toward the middle and lit it with full sun, since the church holds the tomb of William of Orange. Tiny dots of paint on the hull of a boat near the Rotterdam Gate stand in for sparkle off the water.

View of Delft has Vermeer’s monogram on the boat at lower left. The Mauritshuis bought it at an Amsterdam sale in 1822. Marcel Proust saw it there in October 1902, and again in May 1921, when it was lent to an exhibition of Dutch painting at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

In the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time, his novelist Bergotte dies of a heart attack in front of it. That May, Proust wrote about the picture in a letter to the writer Jean-Louis Vaudoyer.

“Ever since I saw the View of Delft in the Hague Museum, I knew that I had seen the most beautiful painting in the world.”

Marcel Proust, letter to Jean-Louis Vaudoyer (May 1921), translated

05Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer (c. 1665)

Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, c. 1665 — She turns to look over her shoulder, lips parted, the pearl catching the light below her ear.
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Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring is his most famous painting, and it is not a portrait. It is a tronie, a study of a type or character rather than a likeness. Dutch girls of the time did not wear turbans, and the pearl is too large to be real: perhaps glass, perhaps invented.

Vermeer made the pearl with little more than two strokes. One is a bright highlight at upper left, and the other is the soft reflection of the white collar beneath.

In 1881 the canvas came up at auction in The Hague, badly neglected. The collector Arnoldus Andries des Tombe and his friend Victor de Stuers agreed not to bid against each other, and Des Tombe got it for next to nothing. When he died in December 1902, a secret will left it to the Mauritshuis.

The Girl in the Spotlight research, begun at the Mauritshuis in 2018, found that the dark background was once a green curtain. It disappeared through physical and chemical changes in the translucent green paint. Vermeer had also given her tiny eyelashes, invisible to the naked eye.

In Amsterdam, the Rijksmuseum has Vermeer’s Milkmaid, painted about 1660 and on display there in October 2026. The museum bought it in 1908 from the heirs of the Six family. For his other pictures and where they hang, see a museum-by-museum guide to Vermeer.

The last years before 1672

06The Feast of St Nicholas, Jan Steen (1665–1668)

Jan Steen, The Feast of St Nicholas, 1665–1668 — The family crowds around the children, with an older man and woman in the background.
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St Nicholas comes in December. In the Netherlands the feast has been kept the same way for centuries: good children get presents, and naughty ones find a switch, a bundle of twigs, in their shoe.

Steen fits all of it into The Feast of St Nicholas. The little girl in front holds a doll of St John the Baptist and a bucket of treats, while the boy at left wails over his shoe. A basket of cakes and rolls sits on the floor, and young people by the chimney sing a St Nicholas song. The Rijksmuseum has owned the canvas since 1809.

Steen (1626 to 1679) made a specialty of unruly households, and his name stuck to the idea. Dutch parents can still warn children that their room is starting to look like a household by Jan Steen.

07The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede, Jacob van Ruisdael (c. 1668–1670)

Ruisdael (1628 or 1629 to 1682) left around 700 paintings, and the Met’s Walter Liedtke called him the greatest of the Dutch landscapists. In this late canvas the mill rises against dark rain clouds. It overshadows the castle and church of Wijk bij Duurstede, with the River Lek in front.

Ruisdael gathered the typical Dutch elements, low land, water and wide sky, and made them meet at the mill, itself just as typically Dutch. The City of Amsterdam owns the painting and lends it to the Rijksmuseum.

Dutch landscape had changed a great deal by then. Jan van Goyen and Salomon van Ruysdael set the pace in the “tonal” phase of Haarlem landscape, from the late 1620s into the 1640s. Jacob van Ruisdael and his former pupil Meindert Hobbema worked in Amsterdam in the 1650s and 1660s, when the city was at its most prosperous. Their fame came later, between the early 1700s and the early 1900s, in London, Paris, Berlin and New York.

Dutch Golden Age paintings and the open market

On an open market, a recognizable subject sold. Some painters kept to one subject, as Hendrick Avercamp did with ice-skating scenes. Others, like Aert van der Neer, moved among nocturnes, sunsets and skating scenes.

Theory ranked the subjects. In 1678 the painter Samuel van Hoogstraten put still life on the lowest grade and history painting on the highest, with scenes of daily life, the “little trifles,” in between. Prices did not follow the theory. The trifles were made in great quantity, often fetched large sums and were collected by bakers, burghers and princes alike.

The word “genre” for such scenes came later, probably from the French writer Quatremère de Quincy in the late 1700s. Behind the whole market was an unusually urban country. In the province of Holland, home to Amsterdam, Haarlem, Leiden and The Hague, as much as 70 percent of the people lived in towns.

Town life did more than anything else to push painters toward secular subjects such as landscape, still life and genre. By one estimate, the Republic made at least 5 million paintings between 1600 and 1700. When the economy sank in the 1670s, low prices pushed painters like Van der Neer toward volume and repetition.

Where to see these Dutch Golden Age paintings in autumn 2026

Seeing all seven this season means adding Madrid to London, Amsterdam and The Hague. Until January 10, 2027, View of Delft is at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. Girl with a Pearl Earring came back to The Hague in early October 2026, after a summer loan to Osaka.

The other five were in their usual homes this autumn, among them The Laughing Cavalier in the Wallace Collection’s Great Gallery and The Night Watch in its own room at the Rijksmuseum. For other national schools, try German painting from Dürer to Franz Marc and Russian painting from Bryullov to Malevich.

Sources

by Luciano Drehmer Published on October 15, 2026

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Frequently asked questions

How long did the Dutch Golden Age last?

About eight decades. Essential Vermeer dates it from the founding of the Dutch Republic, around 1588, to 1672, the Rampjaar, when the Republic faced several military invasions at once. The paintings in this guide fall inside that window, from Hals in 1624 to Ruisdael around 1670.

Who were the leading Dutch painters of the Golden Age?

Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Johannes Vermeer come first. In the Met’s essay on Hals, Walter Liedtke notes that Hals has been placed second only to Rembrandt and, over the last hundred years, to Vermeer. For everyday life, look for Jan Steen, Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch and Pieter de Hooch; for landscape, Jacob van Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema, Aelbert Cuyp and Philips Koninck; for winter ice scenes, Hendrick Avercamp. Judith Leyster (1609–1660) was a member of the Haarlem painters’ guild by 24 and, per Britannica, one of the first to take up the domestic genre scene.

What does the term “Dutch painter” mean?

For the 17th century it means a painter working in the Dutch Republic, the United Provinces in the north. The southern provinces, with the port of Antwerp, formed the Spanish Netherlands, today’s Belgium, and their painters, Rubens among them, are called Flemish. Where an artist worked counts more than where he was born: Frans Hals came from Antwerp, his parents moved to Haarlem when he was young, and he is a Dutch painter.

What did Dutch Golden Age painters paint?

Mostly secular subjects: portraits and militia groups, everyday scenes, landscapes, seascapes, city views and still lifes. In the Met’s account, genre pictures dealt with contemporary society and human nature, still lifes with domestic life and collectibles such as flowers, and seascapes with foreign travel, the sea itself and the grandeur of nature.

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Dutch Golden Age Paintings: 7 Masterpieces and the Stories Behind Them

At a glance

Haarlem and Amsterdam: portraits that move

01The Laughing Cavalier, Frans Hals (1624)

02The Night Watch, Rembrandt van Rijn (1642)