Adriaen van der Werff, Shepherd and shepherdess, ca. 1696
Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister
From the museum website
In collaboration with the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne and the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Kassel, the Dordrechts Museum has organized the first large exhibition of Dutch painting about 1700, including work by artists such as Gerard Lairesse, Adriaen van der Werff, Jan van Huysum and Godfried Schalcken from international museums and private collections. The period following the Golden Age is usually considered to be marked by decline, but the exhibition demonstrates that the opposite was the case. Through changes in the market, in domestic interior styles and taste, Dutch painting received powerful new impulses starting around 1680. It became more elegant and decorative and more attractive to princely courts. Abundant flower still lifes, fashionable portraits of rich collectors, finely detailed genre scenes, arcadian landscapes and exuberant mythologies give a character of its own to an elegant and underappreciated period in Dutch painting.