National Galleries of Scotland

1654

Breenbergh spent ten years in Rome before settling in Amsterdam and was one of the Dutch ‘Italianate’ landscape painters. The story depicted is related in the Old Testament. Joseph has been appointed ruler by Pharaoh and, after storing the harvest during good years, he now sells corn to the people during the lean years. Joseph wears a white turban and holds a sceptre, standing at the top of the stairs, while Pharaoh watches from the balcony. Breenbergh has included references to Rome, such as the Pantheon.

• The Bute Collection at Mount Stuart

c.1650

Aelbert Cuyp was born in Dordrecht and, except for some journeys in Holland down the Rhine, spent his entire life in his home town. He is most famous for his landscapes which combine traditional motifs with the lyrical lighting effects of the Dutch ‘Italianate’ landscape painters. This painting is typical of Cuyp’s rural landscapes of around 1650. It exudes the atmosphere of a summer day after a rain shower, and the cattle are bathed in evening sunlight.

c.1630

Van Haecht was born into an Antwerp family of artists and art dealers. This is one of only five known paintings by him depicting an art cabinet. Such pictures were first introduced in the early seventeenth century by the Antwerp artist Frans Francken the Elder. Most of the artworks depicted in the painting can be identified, though the collection as a whole is an imaginary one.

1658

Pieter de Hooch worked in Delft and Amsterdam and was one of the leading artists of the ‘Delft School’. He exclusively painted genre scenes, such as domestic everyday themes. The man in the foreground of this painting is confronted by the hostess with a coin too small to cover his bill, hence the title of the picture. It shows de Hooch’s fascination with perspective and light. The tiled floor and the ceiling beams create a view similar to a perspective box or a doll’s house.

late 1630s

Jacob Jordaens was a prolific and versatile painter, draughtsman and tapestry designer. He, unlike Rubens and Van Dyck, received few international commissions and rarely left Antwerp during his long and successful career. This picture is probably a fragment of a larger composition formerly attributed to Rubens, and known from a print by Charles Exshaw executed in Amsterdam around 1758-61. The girl has been tentatively identified as Jordaens’s daughter Anna Catharina.

c.1654-1657

Metsu started his career as a history painter, depicting biblical subjects, but later turned to genre painting. An elderly woman is seated on a bench, feeding a spaniel, watched by a man. The distaff and bobbin on the bench and the grindstone point towards the activities of the couple, while the bottle and clay pipe on the windowsill may allude to their leisure. Metsu has brilliantly captured the effects of light and this picture was praised as one of his masterpieces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

about 1645

Antoine, Louis and Mathieu Le Nain moved from their native Laon to Paris in the late 1620s. Attribution of specific paintings to individual brothers is difficult. The brothers never married and shared the same studio, where this picture is presumably set. Antoine is shown seated in front of his easel. Mathieu stands, palette in hand, with Louis to his left. Another brother, Nicolas, is seated on a fine chair, while an unframed portrait of their father, Isaac, rests on the floor.

about 1655-1660

Aert van der Neer is documented as a painter in Amsterdam in 1629. He specialised in landscapes, and is best known for his winter scenes, nocturnes, and landscapes at sunrise or sunset. He has captured the atmosphere of an early winter afternoon in a wide, almost panoramic landscape. The strong light bursting through the clouds and the blue sky visible in the top left corner demonstrate that the picture has been erroneously recorded as a ‘moonlit landscape’ in the past.