ABSTRACT
The artists of Haarlem were among the leaders and guides of seventeenth-century Dutch painters not only in the depiction, of landscape, but also in a very different kind of subject matter, the representation of social life in which groups of figures are shown in a realistically rendered interior or exterior setting. There is reason to believe that Hendrick Goltzius was the key figure in the striking advances toward naturalism in painting in Haarlem. One of the leaders among the Haarlem Mannerists was Karel van Mander, who was born in western Flanders in 1548. The imaginative and romantic Flemish landscape tradition found eloquent exponents among Dutch seventeenth-century painters, foremost among them two great individualists: Hercules Seghers and Rembrandt. Willem Buytewech, like Esaias van de Velde a pioneer in realistic landscape depiction, also explored new ground in scenes of social gatherings of this kind, known to the Dutch as "Merry Company.".
