Boom and Bust The High Art of the Low Countries

The Netherlands.

Has any small nation ever achieved so much in so short a space of time?

For barely 100 years - a time now known as the Golden Age -

this tiny country boasted the most powerful empire on earth.

It was a new kind of society, ruled not by kings but by citizens,

driven not by privilege but by naked market forces,

and it gave birth to the first truly-free art market.

Portraits, landscapes, still lives, sea paintings,

drunken comedies, domestic idylls - what the people wanted, the people got.

And all from geniuses like Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Vermeer.

But how did it happen?

And how do you begin to grasp such a revolution in culture?

Well, I think the best place to start is with a curious tale of horticulture.

In the early 1600s the tulip was an exotic import from Asia.

Then Dutch entrepreneurs learned how to cultivate ever more vivid

shades and shapes, and Dutch consumers went mad for them.

They called it tulip mania.

The spiralling market in tulip bulbs drew in people from all

walks of life. Holland was full of deluded paper millionaires -

simple ship's carpenters, ordinary tailors having themselves

shown around country estates with a view to buy.

By 1637, it's said that the price of a single Semper Augustus

tulip bulb was 10,000 guilders -

enough money to feed and clothe an entire family for their whole lifetime.

And then the bubble burst.

Someone suggested the bulbs were actually worthless.

Everyone tried to sell. Thousands were ruined.

But as always in Holland, there was an artist watching as the

wheel of fortune turned, ready to cash in with a topical satire.

Jan Brueghel the Younger painted this picture.

Basically, he's saying the Dutch have made

monkeys of themselves in this affair of the tulips.

Monkey celebrates, tulip bulb in the one hand,

money bag in the other.

Move over here and we see those who've

lost in the game of speculation.

And here in the corner, we see a monkey having a slash on a patch of tulips.

I think it reminds us that the

Dutch had indeed invented a brave new world of venture capitalism,

but it was also inherently a deeply unstable world.

And this cycle of boom and bust would be repeated throughout

Holland during the Golden Age, both at the grandest scale,

and also in the very lives of some of Holland's greatest artists.

Modern Holland is such a visibly prosperous, easy-going place,

that it's hard to imagine the bitterness

and violence that first gave birth to this nation.

500 years ago, the King of Spain inherited the Low Country region.

The Dutch weren't keen on being a mere province of the global

Spanish Empire.

But what they REALLY objected to was tyranny

and vicious repression at the hands of the Catholic Inquisition.

There are churches in the Netherlands today that still

bear the scars of a furious anti-Spanish backlash that

began in the late 1560s.

I think the natural instinct when you come into the cathedral church in Utrecht is to think

what a beautiful space, what wonderful architecture,

but it's important to remember that this place is actually a battlefield.

And once you get your eye in, you can see how much has been lost,

how much has been destroyed.

If you'd come here before the Reformation,

the whole cathedral would have been ablaze with colour and imagery.

Now what do we see?

White space, blank glass, empty plinths.

Over here in this chapel, look at these little plinths that

once would have supported statues that are no longer there.

On the other side, you've got a little bit of fragmented sculpture.

It's actually Golgotha, the place of the skull,

upon which Christ was crucified.

But the image of Christ himself has gone,

ripped out by Protestant reformers.

This was how Dutch Calvinists lashed out at their Spanish oppressors -

by assaulting the fabric of their own churches in waves

of violent protest known as the Iconoclastic Fury.

They saw it as purification - statues,

paintings and altarpieces were all symbols of Catholic corruption.

But if you want to see the most, almost chilling reminder of the

sheer rage of iconoclasm that swept through this city,

swept through Holland, you have to come into this chapel, because

this is an example of what I call Reminder Iconoclasm, because what

the men with hammers and chisels have done in this case is leave the altarpiece in place,

but defaced - and I mean literally de-faced.

Look at it, you've got the image of God the father above,

Mary with the Christ child surrounded by the saints.

They're all there, and they've still got most of their original colour.

But what's missing? The faces. They've literally been sliced off.

It's as if the men who came in here and did this, they wanted people

to remember forever that they had once made images, they had once,

in Protestant terms, worshipped images, and it was never to happen again.

In 1576, the Low Countries effectively split in two.

Seven northern provinces broke away and declared themselves

an independent Dutch republic, purged of monarchy and tyranny.

Though war with Spain would drag on for decades,

it launched the meteoric rise of a new kind of state,

free of the religious and political paraphernalia of the past.

But how to build a new state from nothing?

How to fill that void?

Well, you could begin by painting the void itself.

Pieter Saenredam, working in the 1600s,

celebrated the unadorned architecture of the Dutch

Reformed Church with a purity that foreshadows Modernism by 300 years.

He takes us to the spiritual heart of the new republic.

The old order is gone, and what remains is man, standing

in the naked truth of God's word, ready to go forth...

and do business!

Why didn't the Dutch Republic turn into an extremist,

Taliban-style state like Puritan England under Cromwell?

The answer is - market forces.

Tiny Holland didn't have the resources to survive without

trade, so its Calvinist leaders pursued a policy of half-reluctant

tolerance towards those of other faiths, as long as they worked hard.

This new society was forged first of all in the crucible

of bustling Haarlem, in the heart of Holland.

By the start of the 17th century, Haarlem was on its way to

becoming one of the great melting pots of Europe.

It was a city known for trade and commerce,

and for religious tolerance, the so called Satisfaction of Haarlem

was a statute passed that guaranteed anyone, whether they be Protestant

or Catholic, could come here and they could practice their trade in peace.

Now this new type of city, filled with merchants,

a new kind of middle class, brought into being a new kind of art,

untethered from the religious traditions of old.

An art dedicated to the depiction of daily life - portraits,

genre scenes, paintings of people drinking,

paintings of peasants, paintings of the countryside,

and its first great star was an artist called Frans Hals.

Like nearly a quarter of Haarlem's residents, Frans Hals and his

family came as refugees from the Spanish-occupied southern states.

By his twenties, Hals had already made his name capturing

the city's bourgeoisie in paint.

Hals' most famous portrait, the so-called Laughing Cavalier, takes

us straight to the beating heart of Haarlem.

We don't know who the sitter was, but we can work out why he wanted to be painted.

The picture was a Valentine's card, this man's gift to the woman

he wanted to marry.

Hence his amorous look, and he's

literally wearing his heart - lots of them, in fact - on his sleeve.

"Have me," it says. "Buy into me and I'll make it worth your while."

Hals could make anyone look a million guilders,

and he was just as impressive when working on a grander scale.

At his peak he cornered the market in a particularly

lucrative form of group painting - the civic guard portrait.

Prosperous burghers generally depicted round a lavish banqueting table,

itself slightly eccentrically recreated here at the Frans Hals Museum.

I think of Frans Hals as the first great painter

of the 17th century Dutch male face - slightly florid,

slightly jowly, extremely substantial,

almost formidably self-satisfied.

But I think he's also the first great painter of the Dutch

sense of civic and political identity.

These men are members of the Company of St George.

They see themselves as the guardians of Haarlem's new-found wealth

and prosperity.

They're seated at their annual banquet

and I think that table stands for Haarlem

and how well it's doing, positively laden with meat, cheese, bread.

They have all they want.

But Hals has done a rather remarkable

and revolutionary thing in painting this picture,

because what he's done is he's taken the international

language of court portraiture, the notion of aristocratic swagger -

look at this gentleman on the right - his elbow is outthrust.

And if you read the deportment books of the 17th century you'll

know that the outthrust elbow is the mark of the gentleman. It symbolises

his right to elbow his way through the crowd of ordinary people.

So he's taken this very grand language, a language that was meant,

that had been invented to be applied to kings, queens

and courtiers, and yet these people are not kings,

princes, aristocrats -

they're merchants. They've made their money through trade.

What this picture proclaims is that we don't need the old regime,

the old apparatus of absolutist monarchy

to function as a society - we don't need it.

We're doing perfectly well without it, thank you very much.

But Hals mania, like tulip mania, didn't last.

The new money that made Hals rich came with new temptations.

He had a weakness for drink.

You can see it in the bags under his eyes and the disenchanted gaze.

Business slipped away, and his painting became less fluent, but more profound.

Near the end, he produced this -

the Regentesses of the Old Men's Almshouse.

These women, the board of Hals' local poorhouse, are painted

in a much more sombre mood, mirroring his own change of fortune.

Commissioning the picture from Frans Hals may itself have been

an act of charity, because his later years were much more troubled.

He fell out of fashion, his fortunes fell.

Now 1664, he was granted poor relief

and three cartloads of peat to keep himself warm.

And it's hard not to think that as he looked into the compassionate, serious faces

of these women, he was moved to reflect himself on the transience of life,

the fragility of life, perhaps the fragility of his own life.

Darkness encroaches from all sides. The picture's 90% shadow,

with just these beautifully poignant faces,

almost the faces of ghosts staring out at us.

I think the picture is very clever, I think it puts you

in the place of someone appealing to these women for charity.

They look at you, they consider your petition. Will they help you?

Won't they help you?

Will you be greeted by the hand that gives,

or will you be refused by the hand that withholds?

I think it's Hals's way of reflecting on

the wheel of fortune that he himself had experienced in his own life,

that no matter how high you rise, in the end,

you do always have to head for the exit.

Just two years after painting this picture, Hals died

virtually penniless.

Boom and bust - it was the Dutch way.

You could even say it was a Dutch invention.

In 1609, Amsterdam's new Wisselbank introduced the world to stocks and shares.

Suddenly, everything was a commodity, especially art.

In 1640, English writer Peter Mundy observed with amazement that

butchers, bakers, even cobblers, eagerly bought paintings to

cover their walls, hoping to sell them again for a profit.

It fuelled a huge boom in secular painting,

every artist specialising in a particular subject.

But all reflected what the Dutch wanted to see - their own world.

Whether it was life in the kitchen,

the sick room,

or the classroom, the national obsession with painting injected

a whole new range of subject matter into the bloodstream of Western art.

But why were images so important to the Dutch?

Because they were attempting to build a new kind of society,

built on the Calvinist work ethic, communal effort.

A society every bit as new as Soviet Russia

was in the early 20th century.

The Dutch needed art to prove that their experiment was working.

And it was the artist's task to fill his blank canvas with

the values of the Republic.

That's why Dutch art was so often just a step away from propaganda.

Even when approaching the most apparently innocent subject matter of all.

The Dutch landscape was itself a work of art, a man-made creation of

immense ingenuity with its polders as they're called, vast expanses

of meadow, fertile meadow irrigated by complex networks of canals.

This is the Beemster Polder, and believe it or not this whole

area was nothing but one vast lake until the 17th century.

In fact, as I cycle through this landscape, I feel very much as if

I'm cycling through a Dutch painting, and there's a good reason for that.

Landscape was one of the great subjects of Dutch art.

When a Dutch painter saw his land, he didn't just see trees,

fields, cloud-filled skies.

He saw symbols of his country's achievements,

and the dangers it faced.

Yes, Hobbema's tonal landscapes are hymns to natural beauty,

but they're also celebrations of fertility and symmetry,

a painter's reminder to his fellow citizens

always to remain on the straight and narrow.

Ruisdael's towering windmills forever draining, irrigating,

stand for the sheer hard work needed to keep Holland

above water, and to safeguard the future of the nation's children.

And Avercamp's skating scenes - what do they say?

Well, you might as well enjoy life, but never forget,

you're always on thin ice.

It's as if the Dutch couldn't help prodding away at their world,

searching everywhere for meaning.

Paulus Potter's The Bull.

It's one of the great wonders of Dutch art.

If you want to understand Dutch pride in their land,

this is the picture that absolutely encapsulates it.

It's painted on the scale of an altarpiece.

We're meant, in a sense, to worship at the image of Dutch prosperity,

Dutch genius. It shows us livestock.

A sheep with her udder pushed into the ground, baby lamb by her side.

Meek cow, flies buzzing - bzzz! - in the air.

You can almost feel the heat of this summer's day.

On the ground - ribbit! - a frog.

But at the centre of it all, this huge, virile bull.

There he stands with his testicles the size of church bells,

his prominent cock standing astride a wonderfully luxuriant patch of vegetation -

this picture's all about fertility.

He's blessed the soil with a humungous turd. Look at that cowpat!

Have you ever seen a more vividly rendered cowpat than that?

In fact, have you ever seen a cowpat in art?

What's most extraordinary about the picture is just the sheer scale of it.

And what that scale expresses, I think, is the magnitude

of Dutch pride in the achievement of having created this land of theirs.

As Descartes said, God made the earth, but the Dutch made Holland.

And boy, did they know it!

The fatted calf - the lamb for slaughter.

Dutch passion for the symbols of plenty was not abstract,

but entirely practical.

The fruits of the earth were not just for looking at,

but for eating too.

The pleasures of food are everywhere in Dutch art,

and you can actually chart the rise of Republican

self-confidence through changing tastes in still-life painting.

Dutch painters rendered the textures of food

and drink with astonishing vividness.

The sparkle of light through water.

The citric glint of lemon peel.

But to begin with at least, it was simple bread and shellfish on

plain white cloth an arrangement of relative modesty and restraint.

By the end of the 1640s, the Republic's 80-year war with

Spain was finally over, and Dutch prosperity was at its height.

Now there's a definite loosening of the belt -

more luxurious food and more of it, exotic props.

The earlier sense of propriety has given way to naked aspiration.

It opened a kind of fault-line in the Dutch sense of civic responsibility.

How rich was it reasonable for a God-fearing merchant to become?

From the start there was a tension between the egalitarian ideals of

the young Republic, and the way this free-market economy actually worked.

Inevitably some people did much better than others.

Living in fine canalside homes, owning fabulous art,

and monopolising the mechanisms of civic power.

'You can still touch that reality in modern Amsterdam

'in a splendid mansion that dates back to the Golden Age.

'What was once new money is now very old.'

So when did your family first come to Amsterdam?

In 1583.

'Owner Baron Jan Six van Hillegom X is the scion

'of one of Amsterdam's longest-established families.'

This is spectacular.

I feel like I've stepped straight into the Golden Age.

'This 46-room house contains one of the most impressive private

'art collections in the world.'

-Is this a Saenredam?

-Yes.

-A real genuine Saenredam!

-Yes, it is.

That's beautiful!

And serenity and the icy colours, they will stick to your eyes.

I like that!

So where do we go next?

Well, whatever you find interesting.

It's sensational.

'Many of the greatest artists of the Dutch Golden Age

'are represented here.'

Wow! What a picture!

The room was created for the painting.

So this is Paul Potter who painted the famous picture of The Bull?

Exactly.

It goes on and on, this house. It's an art gallery.

Ruisdael. This is a Frans Hals.

That's wonderful.

But what does it mean to you, though, emotionally, this collection?

Because you've worked very hard to keep this house together,

to keep it as a kind of microcosm of the Golden Age.

I am Jan Six number ten. So Jan Six number one collected a part...

Jan Six number two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,

and myself, and I used to say,

"You can't be anxious enough in choosing your parents."

I was born and this was gifted, and a lot of pleasure,

but also a lot of taking care of.

'The undisputed jewel in the collection is

'a portrait of the very first Jan Six, painted by his good friend

'one of the greatest of all Golden Age painters - Rembrandt.'

There he is. My goodness.

And there, you see - the painting.

Wow! That is just...it's almost impossible to believe that

a painting can conjure up a human being to such an extent that

you feel that they're THERE.

It's the man almost alive.

What do you think the story of the painting is? What do you think's happening?

I think that he went to Rembrandt's place, they had food, drink - whatever,

and then he leaves.

And then he thinks to himself, "Oh, didn't I forget to say something to Rembrandt?"

And probably that's the moment that Rembrandt was,

"That's the thing, the situation I like to fix on canvas."

It looks like it's painted wet-in-wet, when you paint on...

Sprezzatura.

-Sprezzatura.

-You find it here, and here.

But if you see, the brush thickness here, then Rembrandt took his thumb

and put his thumb here.

-Those are actually thumb prints?

-To make it completed...yes.

There! Yeah, you can see it.

-And that coat...

-He's turned it into almost like an abstract painting.

It's perfect, isn't it? You can see the paint.

But that is so bold and daring.

-Absolutely.

-And yet it isn't abstract, because I think what it conveys, as you say,

it's a man on the move, a man who's about to leave,

-a man who's been in thought for a second.

-In thought, in thought...

-He's thinking.

-Yeah, yeah. That makes it also a little mystic.

-Yes, it's got that enigma quality.

-But it's very good.

-It draws you in, it's a bit like the Mona Lisa.

Nobody knows what the Mona Lisa's thinking, nobody knows what that smile is, and he's not smiling.

And it has an extra...an extra part.

Yeah. I mean, do you think there's a greater Dutch portrait than this?

-Do you think there is one?

-I don't know, but I advise you one thing, take a chair,

sit down and have a good clear look to it!

No Dutch painter pushed his originality as far as this,

blurring the line between finished work and improvised sketch.

"Avant garde" is a later phrase, but a good one for Rembrandt.

Rembrandt had been an original right from the start,

when he arrived in Amsterdam to make his fortune in 1632.

He understood how the art market worked in this thriving city.

He saw that the key to being successful was to be different -

to innovate.

At just 26, he painted this arrestingly visceral depiction of

Doctor Tulp, Holland's first great anatomist. Blood, guts and all.

A brilliantly gory advertisement for Dutch science - Tulp was delighted.

And an even more effective advertisement for Rembrandt.

Yet sometimes his art would cut so deep into the tissues of Dutch

society, that he'd risk alienating the very market that sustained him.

And rarely did he walk a finer line than when painting his best-known work.

So here it is, Holland's most famous painting, The Night Watch.

Although like many famous paintings, it's actually deeply ambiguous

and endlessly fascinating.

Even its title turns out to be a fiction.

It should actually be called the Day Watch,

because Rembrandt has set the scene during daytime,

in a rather dark corner of Amsterdam, with sunlight

streaming in and catching these figures in its beams.

It represents a militia company,

one of many such organisations that had sprung up during the wars

of independence to defend, city by city, against foreign invaders.

Now, what Rembrandt has done with the convention of the militiamen group portrait

is he's suddenly invested it with a new kind of drama, a new kind of energy.

He's turned it into a history painting, almost. It tells a story.

This is the moment when the militia company is about to advance,

and prepares to do battle.

But as is so often the case with Rembrandt, all is not quite

as it seems, because by the time he painted this picture, militia

companies such as these had in effect become a kind of gentleman's

drinking club, more noted for their carousing than their fighting.

And I think Rembrandt has quite a bit of fun with his own

knowledge that they're not actually fighters at all.

Look at their finery.

And there's also this sense running through the whole painting

like a rather subversive current of electricity that they're

not quite sure of what they're doing - look at this musketeer.

He's pouring that gunpowder into his musket

as if he's a bit worried that he might blow his own hand off.

And this chap with his rather unconvincing helmet

gazing at the flintlock mechanism of his gun as

if he can't quite remember how it all works.

And right at the centre of the picture, look how disaster nearly strikes.

A little boy's got his musket out - he's actually fired the thing.

And he's fired it so close to the captain's hat that it looks

almost as if the plumes are about to burst into flames.

Look at the chap behind saying, "Cor, crikey, that was close!"

So yes, this is the great company of Amsterdam's militiamen but at the

same time, Rembrandt's just slightly verging on taking the mickey out

of them. Is he perhaps suggesting that they're a bit of a dad's army?

The militiamen adored the picture, paid Rembrandt a fortune for it,

oblivious to the cutting edge of his wit.

He'd got away with it.

For now, he was Holland's number one painter.

In 1639, he mortgaged himself to the hilt to buy this

house in central Amsterdam now restored as a museum.

Rembrandt knew he'd made it - a five-storey family home

replete with servants and a spacious, well-lit painting studio.

But fortune's wheel turned, and Rembrandt's patrons

began to see that his work wasn't in tune with the great Dutch project.

Especially when he was asked to paint a hero from the nation's ancient past.

In 69AD, Claudius Civilis handled a rebellion against occupying Roman forces.

In Dutch eyes, he was the very first militiaman.

This painting was intended for Amsterdam's elegant new Town Hall,

but the governors couldn't stomach this all-too-human depiction of a half-blind, coarse Barbarian chief.

The picture was turned down - Rembrandt's originality rejected.

It marked a terminal downturn in business

and lifestyle for Rembrandt.

Yet he continued to search the souls of the people he painted

and to ask awkward questions.

In this revolutionary new republic,

the freest society in the world, what did freedom mean?

If you can choose who you want to be,

how do you know which is the real you?

Rembrandt studied humanity. But most of all, he studied himself.

He painted more self-portraits than any previous artist.

He portrayed himself in different costumes,

different moods,

with different expressions.

These pictures form a chronicle of the many faces

and ages of a single life.

And the later pictures reflect, unmistakeably,

the fact that Rembrandt's luck was running out.

By the 1660s, Rembrandt's life was very much on the slide.

He'd been a millionaire,

he lived in a grand house on Amsterdam's main canal.

He'd had a wonderful studio, possessions, riches,

a beautiful wife.

By now, he'd lost nearly everything.

This is one of the great pictures of the Golden Age but there's nothing very golden about it.

It's painted in the colours of flesh, of earth, of penitence.

He's depicted himself in a turban holding a holy book

as the apostle St Paul.

Very much a prophet in the wilderness.

Perhaps Rembrandt himself felt at this time like a prophet in the wilderness.

Certainly, his art for me runs shockingly counter

to most other art of the Dutch Golden Age.

When I think of portraits of the period,

I think that in almost every case,

their function was somehow to create and cement

for the enterprising, yet also rather nervous Dutch,

a sense of their own identity.

But in these late self-portraits,

Rembrandt seems to be questioning the very notion of identity itself.

He's not just reflecting on the slings

and arrows of outrageous fortune.

I think he's reflecting on the fiction of selfhood.

"What is a man?" he asks himself. "Who am I?"

And he has the guts to admit that he really doesn't know.

These pictures are great

because they dare to suggest that a man can be many things.

When I look at them, I'm reminded of the words of the great French philosopher,

Rembrandt's contemporary, Montaigne.

"Every sort of contradiction can be found in me, depending upon some twist.

"Timid, insolent, chaste, lecherous, talkative, taciturn, tough, sickly,

"clever, dull, brooding, affable, lying, truthful, learned, ignorant.

"I can see something of all that in myself, depending on how I gyrate".

Boom and bust again.

Like Hals the drinker, Rembrandt the great innovator died a pauper

aged 63, and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Holland hardly blinked. And why should it?

By the mid 17th century, the Dutch Republic was quite simply

the most powerful nation on earth.

The intrepid agents of the Dutch East India Company

established trading posts at the southern tip of Africa,

round the coast of India and Ceylon, and in the Moluccan Spice Islands.

Meanwhile, merchants of the West India Company had crossed

the Atlantic to colonise parts of the Caribbean

and the coasts of South and North America

including Manhattan Island which they christened New Amsterdam.

The extremes of the Dutch maritime adventure were

mirrored in Dutch maritime art.

More propaganda - Dutch men-of-war vanquishing their foreign foe

in a fusillade of cannon fire.

But there were other, more uneasy pictures too.

Scenes of impending disaster - stormy skies, treacherous rocks.

How hard it was to steer the correct course.

Where Dutch traders went, Dutch artists followed, giving us a

fascinating window into worlds seen by Western eyes for the first time.

Some of the most intriguing colonial paintings were made at Pernambuco,

in the northeast of modern-day Brazil.

Artist Frans Post recorded the tropical landscape

and its exotic plants.

Albert Eckhout painted studies of the local tribespeople, the Tupi.

His portraits are naturalistic, even tinged with sympathy, when so

many other European artists demonised the "foreign savage".

Back home, the Dutch reaped the dividends of Empire.

For a time they were Europe's chief importers of exotic luxury goods -

tobacco, spices, coffee, fine Chinese porcelain.

They also capitalised by making their own cheaper versions

of some of those goods such as the famous Delftware tiles and pottery.

The standard of living in Holland was now higher than in any other

country in the world - they really had never had it so good.

The Dutch embraced the good life - just rewards for hard work.

But still the old Calvinist conscience nagged away at them.

If you have TOO much fun, it might all be snatched away from you.

Even as the party went on, they feared it might be their last.

Let's wait and see.

It's a tension crystallised in the work of a publican turned

painter called Jan Steen.

As an innkeeper,

Steen was no stranger to the sight of people indulging in pleasure.

No surprise, then, that he's famous for painting witty

scenes of domestic chaos.

So much so that even today the Dutch talk disparagingly of a

"Jan Steen household" meaning a particularly anarchic home.

But is there more to Steen's anarchy than meets the eye?

HE CHORTLES

Meet the Dutch neighbours from hell.

Het vrolijke huisgezin - the merry household -

is the name of perhaps Jan Steen's most famous picture,

certainly one of the rowdiest pictures of the Dutch Golden Age.

What I love about it is it's a kind of assembly of human gargoyles.

Look at this gurning head of the family,

grinning his boozy delight at the pleasures of the bottle.

Look at the wizened crone singing a tune.

And there, at the centre of the picture, a kind of profane Madonna,

the mother of the household with her distinctly un-Christlike child.

She's certainly got the cleavage to end all cleavages.

And if you know how to look at these pictures, they're full of warnings

about the moral danger of excess.

The broken egg - symbol of fractured virtue,

the smoke that curls up from the pipe being smoked by the little boy.

That symbolises the transience of pleasure.

And to underscore that moral, there's a piece of paper

pinned above the fireplace which tells us that as the old sing,

so they young will chirrup. In other words,

set a bad example to your children and they will surely follow it.

And yet there's something about the picture that makes you wonder

whether the moral isn't actually just an alibi for having a good old laugh.

Jan Steen was himself, after all, a publican.

He was hardly the enemy of those who sought to overindulge.

And I'm not sure if ultimately he wasn't actually on the same

side as the merry family, laughing along with them

rather than poking fun AT them.

There's a polar opposite to Jan Steen's scenes of mayhem -

Pieter de Hooch's serene, zen-like depictions of Dutch domesticity.

And there's no ambiguity in this art.

Clean house, clean soul is the message.

Everything spotless, nothing out of place.

If you're troubled by the pitfalls of consumer society,

this is somewhere you can control, can keep pure.

Home sweet home.

De Hooch's gentle celebration of an ideal Dutch home is

the microcosm of an entire world.

There was a huge popular vogue at the time for household manuals

such as this. It's a book called The Skilled And Responsible Housekeeper,

And it's a kind of secular book of hours telling the person

exactly what and when to clean.

On Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays for example, we learn that you have to clean the reception

area. On Wednesdays it's the path leading up to the front door.

And at the centre of it all lay one great tenet.

It's written here, "Zindelijkheid is een groot Cieraadt" -

cleanliness is the great gem.

The obsession with cleanliness is a lasting national characteristic.

In Holland you're still expected to keep

the pavement in front of your house spick and span.

And a common aversion to curtains shows you've got nothing to hide.

In the Dutch Golden Age, the house was a symbol not

only of your own moral fibre, but the state of the Republic itself.

After all, what was the Republic but an edifice -

a house where each brick,

each fine, upstanding citizen helped ensure the whole would not collapse.

And it would produce one last, truly great artist who would try to

grasp that dream.

If de Hooch was the great painter of Dutch bricks and mortar,

I think it was Johannes Vermeer who most memorably, most

hauntingly depicted the interior spaces of the Dutch household.

He paints a serving girl pouring milk into a bowl in a humble kitchen.

And yet the whole space is suffused with light that falls on her

almost like a form of benediction.

Your eye is caught by the bread on the table, which inevitably

brings to mind the bread on the altar at the moment of Mass.

She's the high priestess of the home.

Then he paints a woman in blue receiving a letter,

reading it for the first time.

There's a look of anticipation on her face.

The map behind her suggests distance.

Is she receiving news from her beloved, her husband?

Her swollen belly suggests that she's pregnant,

the whole scene has the aura of a secular Annunciation.

She is the Madonna of the house.

And then perhaps most memorably of all,

he paints The Girl With A Pearl Earring.

It's the look of love caught forever on a human face.

You can see the moistness in the corner of her lip,

the wetness in her eye.

It's an utterly beguiling picture.

I think for Vermeer she represents almost the sanctity of love.

She's a person, but she's also a kind of saint.

You'd hardly guess from the hallowed serenity of his art that

Vermeer struggled to make ends meet and lived in a somewhat

troubled home, often plagued by obnoxious relatives.

Perhaps his paintings reflect a longing, not a reality -

a peace he wished he had.

Vermeer was the last truly great artist of the Dutch Golden Age.

Its downfall was his downfall.

1672, when Vermeer turned 40,

was the Republic's great Year of Disaster.

English, French and German forces tried to invade simultaneously

from different directions.

The Dutch had to break the dykes and flood the land to repel invaders.

It broke Dutch global supremacy.

They survived, but their power would never be the same again.

And it broke Johannes Vermeer.

He lost everything in the economic crisis that followed,

and died, aged 43, a destroyed man.

For me, it's one of his paintings that stands for ever as an elegy

to the extraordinary time and place that was Holland in the Golden Age.

This is Vermeer's View Of Delft.

Marcel Proust, the French writer, said it was the most beautiful

painting in the world, and I wouldn't contradict him.

What a picture it is - it's beguiling, entrancing.

It's Vermeer's hometown painted from a vantage point that never was.

And idealised to a great extent, I think.

Look at the way he's tidied everything up.

He's given a kind of geometrical order to the outline

of these buildings in the centre of Delft.

I think it's a picture that encapsulates the great dream

of Holland in the 17th century, the dream of a perfect world,

a place where all is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.

The sun is shining, people are going about their business, peace,

tranquillity, prosperity, order.

And yet, if you look more closely at the picture, I think Vermeer's

also absolutely encapsulated that sense that the Dutch always

had throughout their greatest hour, throughout the 17th century,

that whatever they gain, whatever they made, whatever they profited,

it was always profoundly at risk, it was always vulnerable.

And Vermeer's painted that sense of vulnerability into his idyll

by placing a huge amount of emphasis on transience, on change.

Look at the weather, the sky, that...you can almost feel it moving above you.

And look at the way he's depicted that wonderfully subtle expanse of water.

These lines of white that run across it.

They are they are waves created in the water by the whipping of the wind.

You can feel that wind moving towards you.

There's a wonderful little detail over here on the left where

Vermeer's had the paint ground in a slightly crystalline,

granular way, so that those roofs sparkle. Why do they sparkle?

To show us that it has been raining.

That cloud has dumped its load on those roofs.

But that rain has passed.

This is a moment of perfection, a moment of sunshine.

The storm's passed, but another storm might be on the way.

Vermeer's painted a golden moment

and I think he's, in a sense, painted the Dutch Golden Age itself,

something beautiful, something full of wonder, something extraordinary

but something also destined inevitably to pass and to fade.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd