In The Rhine at Arnheim the image of the city sinks into hazy veils. Above the fleetingly indicated sea of houses rises the symbol of the city, the bastion-like Groote Kerk with its approximately 100 meter-high tower and the older, smaller St. Walpurgis Church with its Gothic double-tower façade.

Jan van Goyen captured the view of Arnheim on a number of occasions. From the years 1642 to 1647 alone eleven dated pictures of the city have survived. The subject is typical of the painter’s late period in which the city, projecting from the horizon in a broad, flat landscape dominates his work.

The wealth of extant sketchbook pages by van Goyen allows us to reconstruct the master’s working methods. Roaming the Dutch provinces he sketched landscape motives which he then, in his studio, combined as the compositional raw materials of his panels. Painting en plein air itself was not actually deemed a discovery until the 19th century.

We know that Van Goyen began his paintings with the distribution of bright and dark areas, in the process fixing the light and space. Only then did he add the individual landscape motives.

Van Goyen’s painting style is sketchy. Quick brush strokes appear next to flowing, transparent varnishes. Instead of the local colours of the landscape, his painting is characterised solely by its grey, brownish, ochre-coloured and greenish shades.

On a wooden table covered by a creased, green cloth the viewer sees an arrangement of crockery and fruits. A bare stonewall forms the tasteful background.

The subject makes great demands of the painter’s skills since the objective of the work is to achieve a portrayal deceptive in its veracity. The sunlight takes on an important role as it plays with the varied optical characteristics of the objects. It glistens on the beaker while reflections illuminate the wine in the glass. At the same time, the velvety peaches absorb most of the light. The reflective drops of water on the grapes emphasise the impression of abundance and plasticity, while still apparently transparent.

In his Teutsche Academie published in 1675, Joachim von Sandrart, a contemporary of the painter and born in the same year, reports that de Heem moved to Antwerp because, ‘there one can have the rare fruits including all manner of large plums, peaches, apricots, sour oranges, lemons, grapes, and other, in better quality and ripeness, (so as to) to reproduce them from life’. As a harbour town living from foreign trade, Antwerp offered de Heem the possibility of perfecting his illusionist painting. This picture is an impressive example of his success.

In this still-life van Huysum combines flowers of differing character in a compact arrangement. He depicts the blossoms, leaves, fruits and animals with great precision, drawing on his entire painterly skills. This life-like manner of portrayal does not contradict the ornamental composition. Despite the plastic qualities of the individual objects, the work is conceived to maximise effectiveness on the visual plane.

Van Huysum’s style is in the tradition of Amsterdam flower painting established by Willem van Aelst in the 1650s, which remained influential into the 18th century. Equipped with the experience of long periods in Italy and France, he imported a visual style characterised by its ornamentation.

The main element of the composition is a slightly skewed vertical axis around which the objects are grouped. Aelst’s strongly contrasted treatment of light and shadow seems somewhat softened by van Huysum’s brighter ground. Van Huysum’s work in turn became an exemplar for several generations of still-life painters of the 18th and 19th centuries.

At a heavy oak table with turned legs sits a noble young woman dressed in a red silk dress and a white satin bodice with slitted sleeves. Her right hand is touching a tin plate with oysters and a peeled lemon on it. In her left hand she holds an oyster fork. On the table also lie a knife and bread along with a silver tray with a wineglass and a white jug.

Van der Neer painted numerous pictures of this type. In most cases the activities of the women depicted and the surrounding objects appear to have a symbolic meaning in reference to a virtue, a vice or the five senses.

Genre paintings also offered the opportunity to depict the qualities of precious materials in all their finery. With virtuosity Eglon van der Neer knew how to reproduce the sumptuous form and silky sheen of the woman’s clothing. The interplay of the three shades of red in the chair, the dress and the sleeves intensifies the colour. In this respect the picture is representative of the last phase of 17th century genre painting, when artists concentrated more than before on the craftsmanship involved in painting.

Roelant Savery created this bouquet from a wide range of flowers and applied his oil paints with the refinement and precision of a drawing. In the foreground the artist has lined up a bee, a salamander, a grasshopper and a mouse next to each other, and presents them to the viewer as if in a scientific study.

In its precise rendering of detail, Savery’s bouquet reveals its indebtedness to nature studies. His bouquet of flowers represents a type of still-life that rose to this level of mastery and importance only in 17th century Holland.

Viewers in Savery’s day would not only have enjoyed the beauty of the pictures. An additional dimension might have given them particular pleasure. In this painting the mouse and the fallen flower can also be understood as a symbol of the earth, the bee of the air, the salamander of fire. The water in the vase complements the arrangement, turning the work into an allegory of the four elements. The four seasons may likewise be symbolised by the flowers which blossom at various times during the year. In their transitory nature, the cut flowers with their short-lived beauty also represent the brevity of earthly life.

What is most captivating about Van de Velde’s picture is its delicate colouring which reproduces the atmosphere of a late afternoon on the coast. The light of the sinking sun illuminates the clouds, glistens on the surface of the water and bathes the sails in a warm glow. Between the two ships at anchor the view to the horizon is unimpeded. The hulls, masts and sails of the ships are harmoniously spread across the picture surface. The intricacies of the ships in their differing proportions and workmanship are well captured. People enliven the scene without their activity creating any disturbance to the well-balanced composition. 

The painting is dated 1672, the year Van de Velde moved to England. The picture portrays the royal yacht with its demonstratively hoisted Dutch flag and may be one of the last paintings the artist completed in Amsterdam.

Van de Velde’s oeuvre reached its peak in his Amsterdam period. The nuanced colouring and subtle lighting of this seascape are the best example thereof.