Emotions: Pain and Pleasure in Dutch Painting of the Golden Age

For seventeenth-century connoisseurs, the beauty of a painting was not nearly as important as the passions that could be seen in it; these were the "soul" of the work. Fear, sadness, surprise, anger, lust and love—the full range of human emotional life can be found in works by painters such as Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Maerten van Heemskerck and Cornelis van Haarlem, who were required by patrons and viewers to convincingly depict human feelings in their scenes. In Emotions, published to accompany an exhibition at the Frans Hals Museum, art historian Gary Schwartz examines this under-explored preoccupation in Dutch Golden Age art through a selection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history paintings, genre scenes and portraits.