Paintings
Approximately 30,000 paintings from the 13th century to the present — Dutch and Flemish Golden Age, 19th-century, modern, and contemporary works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, Steen, Ruisdael, Van Gogh, Mondrian, and others.
The century when painting came down to earth.
hile the rest of Europe painted gods, kings, and martyrs, the Protestant Dutch Republic turned its painters loose on the visible world: a tavern brawl, a quiet courtyard, a herring on a pewter plate. It insisted that ordinary life, rendered with enough skill, was subject enough.
Rembrandt's faces emerge from shadow; Steen's households descend into chaos; Ruisdael hands two-thirds of the canvas to the sky; Hals leaves the brushstrokes showing, as if speed were the point. This is where Western painting learned that the everyday could carry the charge once reserved for the sacred.
