The appealing genre paintings of great seventeenth-century Dutch artists - Vermeer, Steen, de Hooch, Dou and others - have long enjoyed tremendous popularity. This comprehensive book explores the evolution of genre painting throughout the Dutch Golden Age, beginning in the early 1600s and continuing through the opening years of the next century. Wayne Franits, a well-known scholar of Dutch genre painting, offers a wealth of information about these works as well as about seventeenth-century Dutch culture, its predilections and its prejudices. The author approaches genre paintings from a variety of perspectives, examining their reception among contemporary audiences and setting the works in their political, cultural and economic contexts. The works emerge as distinctly conventional images, Franits shows, as genre artists continually replicated specific styles, motifs and a surprisingly restricted number of themes over the course of several generations. Luxuriously illustrated and with a full representation of the major artists and the cities where genre painting flourished, this book will delight students, scholars and general readers alike.

Presents a catalog that surveys the Dutch paintings found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This volume looks at the work of Jan Miense Molenaer, an artist of the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer. He was probably a student of Hals and a spiritual heir of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Essays and plates focus on Molenaer's comic scenes of Dutch peasant life. His versatile work, painted in Haarlem and Amsterdam, also includes: portraits; gene scenes including peasant weddings, theatrical performances, religious narratives and children at school and play; and allegories. 92 colour & 128 b/w illustrations