A History of Dutch Painting in Six Pictures

Video Lectures

Displaying all 6 video lectures.
Lecture 1
Abraham Bloemaert’s Deluge and the Dawn of the Golden Age
Play Video		 Abraham Bloemaert’s Deluge and the Dawn of the Golden Age
This arrangement of almost life-size nudes—an unusual subject for a Dutch painting—is by a master who lived long into the 17th century and was famous for his virtuosity and skill as a teacher. The painting in the Gallery’s collection, a spectacular ballet of fear and impending doom, exemplifies the ideals of the first generation of great Dutch artists.

Recorded on Friday, January 23, 2015, 1:30 pm.
Lecture 2
Jan Steen’s Card Players and Dutch Genre Painting
Play Video		 Jan Steen’s Card Players and Dutch Genre Painting
Dutch painters of the 17th century fed an avid market for pictures of vice and virtue in both humble and grand settings. This picture by Holland’s leading painter of humorous folklife, from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo collection, shows an overdressed soldier being gulled by a girl in an elegant-looking house of ill repute. Walsh discusses Jan Steen’s career and other varieties of genre painting.

Recorded on Friday, January 30, 2015, 1:30 pm.
Lecture 3
Jacob van Ruisdael’s Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede and Dutch Landscape
Play Video		 Jacob van Ruisdael’s Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede and Dutch Landscape
A famous work in the collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, this picture requires a slow, close look in order to see beyond its reputation and observe its subtleties. Walsh examines the place of the work in the career of Jacob van Ruisdael, the finest of all Dutch landscape painters, and considers it in the context of the many new landscape subjects that developed in the 17th century.

Recorded on Friday, February 6, 2015, 1:30 pm.
Lecture 4
The Night Watch: Rembrandt, Group Portraiture, and Dutch History
Play Video		 The Night Watch: Rembrandt, Group Portraiture, and Dutch History
Rembrandt van Rijn’s painting The Night Watch is the centerpiece and climax of the recent reinstallation at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and for good reason: it shows Rembrandt at his most inventive, ambitious, and idealistic. The painting gives heartfelt life and power to a traditional formula for portraiture. To reach a deeper understanding of the work, Walsh looks at it in the context of what the artist’s clients might have expected
Lecture 5
Frans Hals’s Portrait of a Preacher: Virtuosity and the Rough Style
Play Video		 Frans Hals’s Portrait of a Preacher: Virtuosity and the Rough Style
Frans Hals usually painted life-size portraits, but he also made a number of tiny likenesses. Among the loans from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo collection is a painting hardly bigger than a sheet of paper, in which Hals’s celebrated brushwork, loose and suggestive, is scaled down to breathtaking effect. It is a masterpiece of virtuosity and intensity. In this lecture, Walsh surveys the careers of Hals and his competitors.

Recorded on Friday, February 20, 2015, 1:30 pm.
Lecture 6
Johannes Vermeer’s View of Delft: The Prose and Poetry of View Painting
Play Video		 Johannes Vermeer’s View of Delft: The Prose and Poetry of View Painting
Johannes Vermeer invented no new subjects; instead, he transformed the familiar subjects he inherited by using techniques that suffused them with a kind of visual magic. The View of Delft, his city view in the collection of the Mauritshuis, The Hague, is based on a long tradition of topographical paintings, none of which has the same unforgettable effect. Walsh investigates what sets this painting apart.