Rembrandt Van Reijn 1606-1669 | Dutch Golden Age

Rembrandt was probably the most influential painter of the Dutch Golden Age, and is considered one of the greatest artists of all time. Born to a noble family in the Netherlands, Rembrandt had attended latin school but his inclination for art led him to apprentice as a painter. When he was just 18 he bought a studio and shared it with a colleague after training under two influential artists of the time, Jacob Van Swanenburgh and Pieter Lastman. Soon after he began teaching and has been known for training many important artists of the time. Rembrandt was an expert at employing chiaroscuro and creating an atmospheric effect. Rembrandt's skill with these shadows coined the phrase, "What happens when you throw a brick at a Rembrandt?.. It keeps going".

Frans Hals 1580-1666 | Dutch Golden Age | Baroque style

Hals was a Dutch Golden Age painter especially famous for portraiture. He is notable for his loose painterly brushwork, and helped introduce this lively style of painting into Dutch art. Hals was also instrumental in the evolution of 17th century group portraiture. Hals was a master of a technique that utilized something previously seen as a flaw in painting, the visible brushstroke. The soft curling lines of Hals' brush are always clear upon the surface: "materially just lying there, flat, while conjuring substance and space in the eye". Lively and exciting, the technique can appear "ostensibly slapdash" - people often think that Hals 'threw' his works 'in one toss' (aus einem Guss) onto the canvas. Research of a technical and scientific nature has clarified that this impression is not correct. True, the odd work was largely put down without underdrawings or underpainting 'alla prima', but most of the works were created in successive layers, as was customary at that time. Sometimes a drawing was made with chalk or paint on top of a grey or pink undercoat, and was then more or less filled in, in stages. It does seem that Hals usually applied his underpainting very loosely: he was a virtuoso from the beginning. This applies, of course, particularly to his somewhat later, mature works. Hals displayed tremendous daring, great courage and virtuosity, and had a great capacity to pull back his hands from the canvas, or panel, at the moment of the most telling statement. He didn't 'paint them to death', as many of his contemporaries did, in their great accuracy and diligence whether requested by their clients or not.

Johannes Vermeer 1632 - 1675 | Dutch Baroque painter

Johannes Vermeer was a dutch baroque painter who specialized in exquisite, domestic interior scenes of middle class life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime. He seems never to have been particularly wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings. Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, using bright colours, sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference for cornflower blue and yellow. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work. Recognized during his lifetime in Delft and The Hague, his modest celebrity gave way to obscurity after his death; he was barely mentioned in Arnold Houbraken's major source book on 17th century Dutch painting Grand Theatre of Dutch Painters and Women Artists, and was thus omitted from subsequent surveys of Dutch art for nearly two centuries. In the 19th century Vermeer was rediscovered by Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Thoré Bürger, who published an essay attributing sixty-six pictures to him, although only thirty-five paintings are firmly attributed to him today. Since that time Vermeer's reputation has grown, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age.