For all the obvious pleasures offered by Dutch art of the Golden Age, it is remarkable how much puzzlement and antagonism it has aroused. Even as it was being made and marketed, commentators throughout Europe reacted against the ordinariness of its subjects, the frequent vulgarity both of the people and of the activities it presented in such loving and repetitive detail. A more interesting objection was put by Reynolds, who, in writing up his tour of Holland and Flanders, complained about the difficulty of talking about such pictures: intended for the pleasure of the eye, he reasoned, they are not easily put into words. He for one did not try, and simply served up for his readers a brief, annotated list of the works he had seen.

LRB 15 November 1984 | PDF Download