Dutch Golden Age
In Calvinist Holland, churches stopped commissioning art. The biggest patron in the market had disappeared. And yet painting did not shrink, the buyers simply changed. In place of churches and royalty, merchants and craftsmen began buying paintings for their own homes. So the subjects changed too: not biblical scenes, but landscapes, still lifes, kitchens, a woman reading a letter. When the market changes, what gets painted changes with it. Nowhere in art history is that more visible than here. The size of that market turns slightly strange when you put numbers on it. Over the seventeenth century, something like five to ten million paintings are estimated to have been made in this one country (the estimates vary). In the twenty years from 1640 to 1659 alone, between 1.3 and 1.4 million. The population of the Dutch Republic at the time was around two million. Rather more than one painting per person was being made, and sold, to hang in people's houses. Then the other number: of all of them, roughly one per cent survives. The Rembrandts and Vermeers we look at as the Dutch Golden Age are the one per cent that lived. The same is probably true of every band on this map. We look at what survived and take it for the face of an age. One more thing worth noting: landscape, still life and kitchen scenes, the subjects that took the lead here, are exactly the ones the French Academy would later place at the bottom of its ranking. Long before the ranking existed, there was a country running entirely on the bottom of it.