Includes bibliographical references (p. 303-321) and index.

1609-1648 -- Haarlem -- Amsterdam -- Utrecht -- The Hague -- The Dutch Republic, 1648-1672 -- Gerard ter Borch and Caspar Netscher -- Leiden -- Haarlem -- Dordrecht -- Delft -- Amsterdam -- Rotterdam -- Jan Steen -- The Dutch Republic, 1672-1702 -- Leiden -- Delft -- Godfried Schalcken, Eglon van der Neer, and Adriaen van der Werff.

The appealing genre paintings of great seventeenth-century Dutch artists -- Vermeer, Steen, de Hooch, Dou, and others -- have long enjoyed tremendous popularity. This comprehensive book explores the evolution of genre painting throughout the Dutch Golden Age, beginning in the early 1600s and continuing through the opening years of the next century. Wayne Franits, a well-known scholar of Dutch genre painting, offers a wealth of information about these works as well as about seventeenth-century Dutch culture, its predilections and its prejudices. The author approaches genre paintings from a variety of perspectives, examining their reception among contemporary audiences and setting the works in their political, cultural, and economic contexts. The works emerge as distinctly conventional images, Franits shows, as genre artists continually replicated specific styles, motifs, and a surprisingly restricted number of themes over the course of several generations. Luxuriously illustrated and with a full representation of the major artists and the cities where genre painting flourished, this book will delight students, scholars, and general readers alike.