Drei Figuren vor einer Hütte 

Jan van Goyen made this pencil drawing of three figures before a cottage. Van Goyen was one of the most important Dutch landscape painters of the first half of the 17th century, the Dutch Golden Age. Three figures are drawn outside what looks like an ordinary rural house, and the ordinariness of it is important. After the Dutch revolt against the Spanish Empire, Dutch art was less beholden to the aristocratic and Catholic iconography of the Baroque style. The artists of the Golden Age turned their attention to the lives of ordinary people, the land that they worked, and the cities that they built. To understand this work better, we might look to sources from the time: travelogues and economic reports would reveal the social conditions of the people who lived in such houses, while records of artists’ studios and sales might tell us about the art market that van Goyen was part of.