Freed from court patronage and ecclesiastical domination, artists in the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century developed a range of new subject matter and worked on a scale geared to the domestic tastes of a prospering mercantile society and a growing middle class.

Because Calvinists excluded religious art from their churches, when artists such as Rembrandt treated religious subjects, they were destined for private display and offered a personal interpretation of scripture. However, the moralistic tone of Dutch Protestantism stimulated a wealth of satirical genre paintings made for the home, and left room for artists to explore a new range of subject matter, such as landscape and still-life.

Dutch reticence in the religious sphere was more than compensated for by their enthusiasm in representing their own world: their families, homes, cities, and water-filled landscape, as well as the flowers and food that adorned their tables. Because wealth was widely spread through the urban population, it is the `sovereign lords miller and cheeseman,' and their wives and children that Dutch artists immortalized. Through them, artists gave visual form to their community and professional as well as family identity. Thereby, the Dutch reveal themselves as both traditional and modern in outlook, with an eye as much on this world as the next, preoccupied with science and morals, luxury and restraint.

The unprecedented quantity of landscapes, marines, and still lifes painted in seventeenth-century Holland testify to the high value placed on the local environment. The consistently naturalistic manner of representing their world reflects Dutch indifference to Classical notions of ideal order. Instead, they celebrated the local particularities of the natural world as affected by wind, rain, time and storm. In so doing, they acknowledged their land's inherent value as part of the created order, as well as its local significance to them in light of their recently won independence.

Dutch mercantile prosperity is reflected not only in the sheer volume of art produced for domestic consumption, but also in the massive expansion of Amsterdam during the seventeenth century. However, as this expansion transformed the city, the regional characteristics of Dutch domestic architecture were gradually supplanted by a preference for Classicism. With the building of Amsterdam's new town hall, to symbolize the wealth and confidence of the new republic, the traditional, modestly-scaled Dutch town houses were completely overshadowed.

As for interaction with Non-Western cultures, Dutch worldwide trade stirred up curiosity about distant lands, stimulating art as well as cartography. Yet, while Frans Post in 1636 became the first trained landscape painter to visit the New World, it would be another two centuries before a European artist would capture anything profound about the life and values of non-Western people.