Visual arts is an important and extraordinary phenomena in the Dutch paintings in the early 17^th century. The Dutch people took their achievement with a lot of pride especially matters concerning the art of painting. They created different portraits, genre scenes, still life pictures, landscape, and biblical scenes. The scenes were quite admirable and lovable by many in the European art history. Dutch paintings have won a number of prestigious awards such as the Dutch paintings of the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award for their high-quality art of publishing. Their famous artistic skills denote a very rich past full of beautiful paintings, which are a representation of their culture and traditions.

The seventeenth-century Dutch art represented a unique form of visual expression in Netherlands with most of them expressing the lifestyle of the middle-class urban elites. It is possible to recognize dutch paintings because of the unmistakable signs such as its small format, concentration, and powerful and sober color. Dutch artists have been famous since the 17^th century because of their illusionistic skills and their ability to capture some myriad textures of familiar environments. Many of the captions are streets, landscapes, public and domestic interiors making them admirable by many people all over the world. Some of the conscious and ingenious system behind the painters such as Jan Verneer, Gabriel Metsu, and Gerard Ter Borch among others. The paintings were mostly for decorating homes of the urban bourgeoisie with scenes of secondary space created by leaving a gap through mountains or trees. The artists of the 17^th century used divided spaces for the organization and enrichment of the images to denote social and domestic life.

The interior pictures had divisions of two or more spaces and scenes of daily life were popular to the Dutch artists and their patrons. After the 1640s, many of the houses interiors contained scenes of daily life activities with some pictures and maps along the doorways. One of the paintings by Hedrick Sorgh in Rotterdam had a figure of a mother who devoted her time for her children. In some scenes such as the courtship, paintings consisted of men and women drinking or playing music. Other paintings were biblical and mythological scenes on walls addressing various issues and narrating stories. Dutch paintings can say a lot just in a small setting through the conceptualization of the images. The texts and pictures were a form of entertainment and vehicles for persuasion and challenge in the 17^th century. The secondary pictures in Dutch paintings were for commentaries and pictorial and not verbal representing the painters’ thoughts. The paintings provided the aspect of rhetoric and a chance to consider many sides of the issues both simple and complex. The splitting of images into several parts is a fundamental feature of the Western image making as it occurs in the medieval pictorial systems. The separation of the pictures provided a wider theme for the picture or narrative.

Some of the Dutch painters integrated religious images with secular ones from the modern life and used the traditional formula to depict the real life. The mainstream Baroque art consisting of architecture, painting, and sculpture related closely to the Roman Catholic counter-reformists efforts to reestablish the church influence in Europe. The Protestantism awakening led to the funding of the work of arts by the catholic church. Painters specialized in various categories of paintings such as biblical themes, mythological, landscape, political, and marine themes to do their paintings. The artistic skills were transmitted from the masters to their aspiring young artists through many years of apprenticeship. There was no formal training and most of the painters learned the skills from the order folks. The seventeenth-century painters followed a step-by-step method with the workload divided into various phases to enable working on one phase at a time. The painters gave a lot of attention to perspective underused varying paint consistencies due to the scarcity of different colors. Research shows that there were three or four stages of painting which included inventing, the dead coloring, and the working up. Finally, there was the retouch to make the painting more presentable to the interested individuals.

During the golden of Dutch art, millions of artworks were produced although only around 1 percent has survived the ages. Most of the paintings in houses and the abundance of money due to the rise in capitalism in Netherlands led to more paintings for sale. Since most of the Dutch inhabitants had surplus resources they decided to furnish their houses with pictures from paintings. There was a great demand for the paintings which were sold at low prices for the decoration of houses. The seventeenth Century Dutch art was recognized as an urban form of visual expression in Netherlands and the surrounding cities where there were many artists.

Some Dutchmen condemned the art of painting and termed it as immoral and unreligious, but the lovers of paintings continued with their artistic skills. The artists later came up with the new form of paintings of their self-portraits, which were highly valued in the art market. The paintings were in different categories such as histories concerning bible stories, mythology, The wealthy people and the most popular bought paintings of histories and allegories. The next popular painting was that of landscape followed by the portraits, still life, and finally Genre.

Dutch paintings were highly valued and fetched high prices in the market in the 17^th Century. Many paintings could be traced in homes belonging to the wealthy individuals as most of them were for the decoration of the houses. The artistic skills were transmitted from the masters to their young sons and daughters aspiring to be artists through many years of apprenticeship. . It is possible to recognize Dutch work of art because of the unmistakable signs such as its small format, concentration, powerful and the sober color. The artists of the 17^th century used divided spaces for the organization of the paintings to denote both social and domestic life.

References

Grootenboer, Hanneke. The rhetoric of perspective: Realism and illusionism in seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting. University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Hollander, M. (2002). An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. Univ of California Press.

Nga.gov,. ‘Dutch Paintings Of The Seventeenth Century’. N.p., 2015. Web. 17 June 2015.http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/research/online-editions/17th-century-dutch-paintings.html