The Impact of 17th-Century Dutch and Flemish Genre Painting on American Genre Painting, 1800-1865

Seventeenth-century Netherlandish painting enjoyed great popularity in the United States prior to the Civil War, and genre painters were especially receptive to this pictorial tradition. Americans responded keenly, because social, political, and economic parallels existed between the seventeenth-century Dutch republic and nineteenth-century America. Both societies developed mercantile middle classes which sought definition, in part, in literal artistic representations of their world. Thus, Americans embraced the older tradition of art and modeled their taste for contemporary painting on it. As a commitment to the arts flourished in major cities along the Eastern seaboard, art institutions and private individuals began to form collections, and Dutch and Flemish art had particular appeal. Americans were attracted to the accurate depictions of the tangible world. Many collectors also admired this phenomenon in American paintings, and comparable examples of Dutch and American art co-existed within a single collection. Americans could see and learn about the art of the Low Countries in many ways. Netherlandish art constituted a noticeable presence in exhibitions and the auction trade. Furthermore, exposure was sustained through keen interest in engravings after paintings and illustrations in treatises, gallery guides, and periodicals. Travel abroad permitted the most direct contact with the Old Masters, and artists were the major beneficiaries. They not only saw the great paintings in public and private collections, but they also could copy them. Such scrutiny was instructive and provided needed income. Among genre painters in the first half of the nineteenth century, the response to seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art struck a widely divergent chord. Some manifested a strong theoretical interest; while others exhibited a profound artistic reaction. In addition to the numerous American artists who appreciated the Dutch style, a great many immigrating European artists brought with them an admiration for this earlier northern tradition. Thus, utilizing a multiplicity of approaches, the genre tradition in America established a substantial framework with a solid foundation in the art of the seventeenth-century Netherlands.