From the museum website, 18 January 2013
Paintings, prints, sculpture and historical artifacts from the 16th-18th c. Netherlands, Germany, England, France and colonial NY show how art pictured new attitudes about man and the natural world and reflected a rise in democracy and the middle classes. In sites impacted by the Protestant Reformation, religious, social, and scientific revolutions engendered a flowering of secular subject matter and naturalistic aesthetics that gave birth to modern art genres.