Dutch Genre Painting

A century ago, after a month in The Netherlands, the French artist and critic Eugène Fromentin wrote that seventeenth-century Dutch paintings presented a “portrait of Holland, its exterior image, faithful, exact, complete, and like, with no embellishment” (Les maîtres d'autrefois, 1882). The splendid exhibition Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, ensconced at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the spring of 1984, invited comparison of our own experience with that of Fromentin, whose reaction was typical of most viewers well into the twentieth century. For the multitudes of visitors—and this was Philadelphia's most popular show ever—the “portrait of Holland” was captivating.