Five rooms for the Dutch Golden Age

One corridor, five rooms, one century

Rooms 20, 21, 22, 23 and 25 follow one another in the north wing of Level 2. Almost everything on view was painted between 1600 and 1700 in the United Provinces, with one exception: Room 21. Anthony van Dyck was Flemish, from Antwerp, but he features here as the official painter to King Charles I of England, not as a Dutch painter.

The thread running through it is spatial rather than chronological: you start with the open landscape, with no principal figure, and arrive at interior scenes with a single figure and a window. The route works just as well in reverse if Room 25 is crowded early in the day, which often happens in front of the two Vermeers.

1. Room 20 — An avenue, a canal, a flat light

Meindert Hobbema had virtually stopped painting by the late 1660s, after securing a well-paid post as a wine gauger for the city of Amsterdam. The Avenue at Middelharnis, signed and dated 1689, is one of his last known works, painted twenty years after the bulk of his output. Dutch landscape painting almost always sold on the open market, with no identified patron; this picture probably broke that rule. It resurfaced in a collection near Middelharnis, which points to a local commission, and it is also known that the elms lining the road were only planted in 1664: the painting seems to have been made to record a recent piece of development, likely commissioned by a local notable or by the town itself. It was bought by the town of Middelharnis in 1782 for its town hall, later exchanged for copies before passing to Scotland, into Robert Peel's collection, and finally to the National Gallery in 1871 with the rest of the Peel collection. Take the time to step back a few paces: David Hockney pointed out that the composition plays on two vanishing points, one on the road, the other in the sky.

Next to it, two landscapes by Aelbert Cuyp apply to the Dutch countryside a golden light he never actually saw in Italy, having never set foot there. The larger of the two, River Landscape with Horseman and Peasants, only entered the collection in 1989; the other, like the Hobbema, comes from the Peel collection. A Pool surrounded by Trees by Jacob van Ruisdael, more contemplative than his usual landscapes, rounds out the room, as does The Haarlem Lock, Amsterdam, Hobbema's only known townscape.

2. Room 21 — Van Dyck and the English court

Anthony van Dyck became Charles I's official painter in 1632. The Equestrian Portrait of Charles I, painted for the king around 1638, measures almost 3.70 metres high: the scale and the side-on pose deliberately echo the iconography of equestrian statues of Roman emperors, linking mastery of the horse to mastery of the state. The painting left the royal collection after Charles I's execution in 1649, passed through several European collections, spent time at Blenheim Palace, before the National Gallery acquired it in 1885 for 17,500 pounds.

The double portrait of Lord John Stuart and his Brother, Lord Bernard Stuart, painted the same year, shows two teenagers barely seventeen and eighteen years old, in postures that brush against each other without their gazes ever meeting. Both died in battle for the royalist cause, in 1644 and 1645. Next to it, Lady Elizabeth Thimbelby and her Sister was long misidentified: it took an old copy bearing inscriptions to establish which of the two sisters is Elizabeth, shown receiving roses from a Cupid in reference to her recent marriage. Look at the three canvases one after another: Van Dyck paints fabric more than faces, and it shows from one painting to the next.

3. Room 22 — Rembrandt, flesh and intimacy

Around twenty works by Rembrandt fill this room, the densest on the route. A Woman bathing in a Stream, a small oil on panel painted in 1654, shows a young woman hitching up her shift in the water with a freedom of touch rare for him. It is thought to depict Hendrickje Stoffels, who entered Rembrandt's household as a servant around 1647-1649 to look after his son Titus after Saskia's death, and later became his companion. Saskia's will effectively barred them from marrying, on pain of Rembrandt losing part of his income, so they never married. In 1654, the very year of this painting, Hendrickje was summoned before the Reformed Church council and publicly rebuked for pregnancy outside marriage — a stark contrast with the almost private tenderness of the scene painted that same year.

An Elderly Man as Saint Paul and A Franciscan Friar belong to a series of imagined religious figures that Rembrandt painted in the 1650s, in the midst of financial difficulty, for the open market rather than on commission from a church. The choice of a Franciscan subject is surprising in itself: Rembrandt worked in a city, Amsterdam, where Catholic worship was officially banned. Step in close to see the impasto, then step back: the two readings of the painting bear little resemblance to each other.

4. Room 23 — Haarlem, portraiture and big sky

This room, devoted to the Haarlem school, brings together two portraits by Frans Hals that share nothing beyond their proximity on the wall: that of Jean de la Chambre, painted around 1638 as a model for an engraving intended to illustrate a calligraphy manual, and that of Marie Larp, painted around 1635, whose true pendant — the portrait of her husband Pieter Tjarck — is held at LACMA in Los Angeles, separated from hers by a Paris sale in the late nineteenth century. Hals's visible, rapid brushwork, which never seeks to smooth the paint surface, is recognisable from one portrait to the next.

Two landscapes by Jacob van Ruisdael round out the room: A Panoramic View of Amsterdam looking towards the IJ, painted partly from the scaffolding of the new Amsterdam town hall then under construction — currently on loan from a private collection, so not guaranteed to be on the wall on every visit — and A Landscape with a Ruined Castle and a Church, where the sky fills nearly two-thirds of the canvas.

5. Room 25 — Vermeer and domestic light

Only around thirty paintings worldwide are attributed with certainty to Johannes Vermeer, by the National Gallery's own estimate — the figure ranges between 34 and 36 depending on the specialist. Two of them are here, both painted around 1670-1672 and of almost identical format: A Young Woman standing at a Virginal, bought in 1892 for 29,000 francs at the sale of critic Théophile Thoré's collection — Thoré had helped bring Vermeer out of obscurity in the nineteenth century — and A Young Woman seated at a Virginal, which entered the collection through the Salting bequest in 1910. In this second canvas, the painting hanging on the back wall — a Procuress by Dirck van Baburen — adds a deliberate ambiguity to an otherwise very demure scene.

A Musical Party in a Courtyard, by Pieter de Hooch, painted in 1677 and acquired in 1916, completes the room. The two Vermeers are usually hung side by side: take the opportunity to compare the standing woman and the seated woman, two variations on the same instrument and the same window light.

How long it takes

This route takes a little under an hour without stopping for long, or an hour and a half if you take the time to read the labels of the works mentioned.

Room 20 — Dutch landscapes (Hobbema, Cuyp, Ruisdael). — 10 minutes.
Room 21 — Van Dyck. — 10 minutes.
Room 22 — Rembrandt. — 15 minutes.
Room 23 — Haarlem (Hals, Ruisdael). — 10 minutes.
Room 25 — Vermeer and De Hooch. — 10 minutes.

Sources and verification

Every date, dimension and provenance has been checked against the National Gallery's official catalogue entries (nationalgallery.org.uk) and cross-checked with the following sources:

Displays and room openings can change. Check the National Gallery website on the day of your visit before following a route.

Listen to the commentary in the gallery

This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.