Art Market In The Golden Age

Innovations were brought to the seventeenth-century Dutch art market. Initially, artists joined the artists’ guild, such as the guild of St. Luke, after well trained in the artists’ schools or in apprenticeships. The guild usually restricted the sales of the artists’ works. Therefore, artists were not allowed to trade their art pieces freely. However, over the course of the seventeenth century, commissions decreased, and artworks were more affordable for the middle class. Especially after the Eighty Years’ War, when Dutch gained independence from Spanish rule and embraces the Golden Age, the expansion of economic activities as well as the growth of the middle class acted as a fertilizer for the prosperous Dutch open art market. In her article
Instead, it varied hugely depending on its rarity, subject matter, condition, and the artist who created it. Also, some artists, such as Guercino, can set prices for their works, whereas some other artists, such as Reni, let the clients to determine the values of their pieces. Generally speaking, the open market that led artists to be individualized and to get involve in civil conversations as well as the method to determine the values of artworks show the innovation in the seventeenth-century Dutch art
With the increased demand for artworks, the artist produced a large number of paintings without sacrificing the paintings’ high qualities. They specialized in a particular type of painting, for instance, landscape painting, still-life painting, portraiture, history painting, and genre painting (although the term “genre painting” was not invented until the eighteenth-century). Before 1650, the history painting was the most popular genre. However, after 1650, the landscape painting became the most common type, because it was one of the most affordable one. Moreover, a majority of the population moved from the countryside to the urban area, generating some nostalgic for the countryside, so there are many representations depicting the countryside. Additionally, the way to draw the landscapes also changed. In the sixteenth century, the landscape served as the background of a painting, and the emphasis were the figures or scenes placed in the foreground. While in the seventeenth century, landscape paintings, such as Stone Bridge made by Rembrandt van Rijn in the late 1630s and After the Rain created by Jan van Goyen in 1631, depict the natural environment as the main focus of the image. Also, the figures in the image, used to animate the painting or to show the scale of the scene, are smaller and fewer in number as shown in the piece River Landscape painted by Aelbert Cuyp in