Adjusting to Hard Times: Dutch art during its period of crisis and restructuring (c. 1621–c. 1645)

Abstract

During the 1620s, 1630s and early 1640s there was a marked tendency in Dutch painting, well known to art historians, towards smaller, more modest pictures and more sober colouring. This period, sometimes called the ‘monochrome phase’, and the subsequent shift back to larger, more splendid and more highly coloured painting in the late 1640s, can arguably be explained in general historical terms, in terms that is of the specific context of the Dutch Republic, its society and economy between 1621 and the early 1640s. The great advantage of such an essentially ‘historical’ general explanation of the phenomenon is that it can explain many more accompanying features of the ‘monochrome phase’ than is possible by using a strictly art‐historical approach, which would attribute the shift essentially to ‘changes in taste’, or is possible by using an essentially economic theoretical explanation that would attribute the shift to ‘product innovation’. Thus, the general historical explanation can also embrace the cessation of large public commissions in the 1620s, the temporary decay of Dutch flower painting and, above all, the specific timing of the onset of the monochrome phase in a way that the other explanations cannot.