This lavishly illustrated book is an authoritative and perceptive study of Dutch painting from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Seymour Slive focuses on the major artists of the period, analyzing works by Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Jacob van Ruisdael, and others. He discusses the kinds of painting that became Dutch specialties—portraits, genre scenes, landscapes, seascapes, Italianate pictures, architectural painting, and still lifes—as well as traditional biblical and historical subjects painted by artists of the period. He also examines patronage and trends of art theory, criticism, and collecting. This book replaces the classic section on painting in Dutch Art and Architecture: 1600-1800, jointly written by Slive and Jakob Rosenberg in the 1960s. Slive has completely rewritten and expanded the original text, taking into account his own and other recent scholarship on Dutch painting as well as new archival finds, technical analyses of paintings made by conservators and scientists, and significant pictures that have been discovered. The number of illustrations has doubled, and the result is a book that will immediately establish itself as the new standard work on this great period of painting.

Seymour Slive is Gleason Professor of Fine Arts emeritus at Harvard University. He is a former director of the Fogg Art Museum and the founding director of the Sackler Museum, both at Harvard University.