Gods, Saints and Heroes: Dutch Paintings in the Age of Rembrandt

“Gods, Saints and Heroes” was a major three-venue travelling exhibition devoted to seventeenth-century Dutch history painting, organised by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where it opened in November 1980, before moving to the Detroit Institute of Arts (February–April 1981) and closing at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (May–July 1981). Its central argument was a corrective one: that the hierarchy of genres in the Dutch Golden Age placed history painting (biblical, mythological, and allegorical subjects) above portraiture and still life, and that earlier scholarship had consistently underestimated this branch of Dutch art. The catalogue, edited by Albert Blankert and an international team of scholars including Beatrijs Brenninkmeyer-de Rooij, Christopher Brown, Eric Jan Sluijter, and Christian and Astrid Tumpel, set a new standard for the field.

“Diana and Her Companions,” lent by the Mauritshuis in The Hague, appeared as catalogue number 54 (pages 210-211, illustrated). Its inclusion among the exhibition’s mythological works reflected the ongoing scholarly debate over its attribution: the painting was accepted by Blankert and the catalogue authors as an early Vermeer, placing it within the Utrecht Caravaggist tradition that shaped Dutch history painters of the 1650s. The exhibition context thus helped consolidate the painting’s place in Vermeer’s early oeuvre at a moment when that attribution was still contested in some quarters.

The show’s published catalogue became a standard reference for Dutch figurative painting and helped redirect critical attention toward artists such as Abraham Bloemaert, Pieter de Grebber, and Jan van Bijlert, whose large-scale religious and mythological works had long been overshadowed by the genre and landscape painters more familiar to twentieth-century audiences.