About Dutch Art

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you all had a good start of the year.
My start is pretty awesome overall :) Not exactly very special but I was happy and satisfied. I hope this will be a good year for me.
So this is the first update in 2011! Yay :D

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I was reading the Art History book and I saw a section on Dutch art.
At first I frowned, questioning:"What the heck is Dutch art? It doesn't sound very special."
Of course that was before I read the book and saw the art XD
I really like the style of Dutch Art during their Golden Age. I love its details and advanced techniques in portraiture as well as still life and flower painting.
I can understand the Dutch's love for genre painting, I guess, because Amsterdam and other Dutch areas give me the "down-to-earth" kind of feeling. I wonder why it never gave me an urban-like impression..I haven't even been to Amsterdam before and it's strange how the image just formed in my head :/

The first portrait that made an impression on me is the "Buffoon Playing a Lute" by Frans Hals. When i think of "portraits", I think of pictures with a person drawn in naturalistic style with that person's most distinct characteristics of the appearance. Just appearance. With no expression what-so-ever. And usually in my mind, a portrait contains only one's body above one's shoulder as well.

But look at this:



My first reaction seeing it is this: o_0

And then it completely altered my mind about portraits. This portrait shows movement and emotion that depicts the characteristic of the person-both appearance-wise and personality-wise. The convincingly joyful smile is also a very rare case during that period of time. This also made an impression on me because it gives me an warm feeling seeing the person enjoying life so much.

I also like the still lifes of Dutch art, especially their vanitas paintings. I like their idea of wanting to show the fleeting life because this way it emphasizes the "moment" more. (Why is this starting to sound more and more like Impressionism..? Hmmm)



An example.

Flower paintings of Rachel Ruysch impressed me as well. I like her detail of each petal as well as the colours.



Pweety~~

But unfortunately to be frank, the Genre paintings of Dutch Art is not as impressive in my mind. It's like any other genre paintings to me. I can't see anything special except maybe their light source.

Well that's about it ~