The uneven survival of seventeenth-century Dutch painting has left a distorted view of the period. Canonical masterpieces by celebrated figures dominate cultural memory, while the vast substratum of everyday production that once sustained the Dutch art market has largely vanished. The late seventeenth-century mass production of landscapes, pastoral cattle scenes and decorative overdoors was often consumed as a form of domestic furnishing. Few designed cycles in original settings remain intact, and when such ensembles do survive, they stand out as rare evidence of a market that thrived on abundance, variety and serial consumption. What survives today privileges the extraordinary over the ordinary, so that what was once a living fabric of visual culture is now filtered through a narrow canon.
Dirck van den Bergen (1645–after 1690) represents this broader stratum of Haarlem painters whose work was less innovative than that of their early-century predecessors and relied more on well-elaborated formulas adapted to a saturated market. Haarlem itself held a distinctive place among the Dutch cities. Long an active centre of painting, its prominence grew after the fall of Antwerp in 1585, when shifting trade and migration patterns brought it new artists and new demand. The re-chartering of the Guild of St Luke in 1590 consolidated this position, and in the decades that followed Haarlem became renowned for the breadth of its artistic life. Naturalistic landscapes and animal pieces, formal portraiture, expressive tronies, peasant interiors, decorative cycles and ambitious history paintings all flourished, while a vigorous print industry bound its painters to civic identity and humanist culture.
This flourishing was tempered by demographic and economic pressures. Recurrent plague, especially in the 1630s, reduced the city’s population and narrowed its market. Haarlem never ceased to produce, but by the mid-century its primacy was challenged by Amsterdam. Through the 1650s and 1660s its painters continued to refine and specialise, yet by then abundance had tipped into overproduction. The middle-class buyers who had once sustained Haarlem’s boom were themselves under pressure, and the market favoured repetition and familiar formulas.
It was in this environment that Dirck van den Bergen trained. His work belongs to the Italianising branch of the landscape tradition, a mode that idealised nature with warm Mediterranean light, harmonised compositions and the integration of figures and animals into Arcadian settings. The idiom had been imported into the Republic by Jan Both (c.1618–1652), Jan Asselijn (c.1610–1652) and Nicolaes Berchem (1620–1683), who worked in Rome in the 1630s and 1640s and brought back Arcadian fictions blending memories of the Campagna with Dutch narrative sensibilities. Karel Dujardin (1622–1678) continued the tradition with lyrical elegance, Paulus Potter (1625–1654) gave cattle monumental autonomy, and Adriaen van de Velde (1636–1672) produced smaller, highly finished pastorals of great refinement. Van den Bergen adopted these models yet remained in their shadow, producing competent, formulaic variants aimed at the broad middle tier of the market.
By the 1660s the wider Dutch system showed signs of strain. Production had been immense for decades, and households were saturated with paintings. The most accomplished masters still commanded high prices, but middling painters faced intensifying competition. The crisis of 1672, the Rampjaar, accelerated the downturn: war and political upheaval disrupted the market, and commissions became concentrated in fewer hands. Local artistic ecosystems continued to function, but their autonomy was weakened, and many second-rank painters looked abroad for work.
London in the 1670s became a particular magnet. The Van de Veldes—Willem the Elder (1611–1693) and Willem the Younger (1633–1707)—secured royal stipends for marine painting. Abraham Begeyn (1637–1697) found work with Italianate pastorals, and Jan Wyck (1645–1700) with battle and equestrian scenes. The Dutch Church at Austin Friars served as a communal hub, easing the integration of newcomers. Demand came not only from the court but also from noble families refitting their estates after the Restoration. These patrons often sought not unique cabinet pictures but coordinated suites of paintings for architectural schemes. Dutch and Flemish painters were attractive not simply because some worked for relatively modest fees, but above all for their technical polish, speed of execution, and ability to deliver coherent decorative ensembles. Some, such as the Van de Veldes and Wyck, established long-term careers in England; others found shorter-term employment before returning to the Republic. The pattern was mixed, reflecting both opportunity and precarity in the late seventeenth-century art market.
Ham House in Richmond provides one of the rare surviving sites where this demand for coordinated decorative schemes can still be studied. John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale (1616–1682), and Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart (1626–1698), modernised the interiors in the 1670s with the aim of decorative coherence. Van den Bergen supplied at least eighteen canvases, an unusually large cycle for a minor painter.
The signed Landscape with an Old Herdsman and Young Market Girl Fording a Stream followed by Two Horse-and-Carts with Grooms (1675) was probably the centrepiece, combining animals, carts and rustic figures in a carefully orchestrated composition. Mountainous Landscape with a Caravan and Landscape with Ruins, a Tomb, Herdsfolk, Sheep and Goats provided monumental anchors, drawing on Berchem’s vocabulary of ruins and antique motifs. Narrow horizontals such as Herdsman, Horseman and Cattle, Night Scene with Figures grouped around a Fire and A Landscape with a Shepherd under an Awning were conceived as overdoors, integrating painting with architecture. Variations such as Landscape with Figures, Horses and a Dog, Ruins in the Distance and Landscape with Figures, Cattle, Sheep, and a Castle in the Distance reinforced decorative rhythm. Domestic inflections appear in A Mother with Two Children, Two Cows, Sheep, and an Ass outside a Cottage and Landscape with a Milkmaid milking a Cow, while myth and allegory were subdued into pastoral contexts in Landscape with Mercury and Battus and An Old Woman and a Young Girl in a Garden (Vertumnus and Pomona). A Pair of Lions with a Leopard in a Cave and Figures spearing a Lion devouring a Fallen Rider introduced controlled violence, providing contrast within the sequence.
The Ham House cycle demonstrates how a Haarlem idiom was repurposed abroad. In the Republic, Arcadian pastorals had become overfamiliar, and for a painter like van den Bergen they were increasingly difficult to sell. In London, however, they could serve as signs of continental refinement. The Lauderdales did not seek singular masterpieces but required a coherent programme to unify their rooms. Van den Bergen’s canvases, serial and formulaic, fulfilled this decorative brief.
The reception of Italianised Arcadian landscapes in England helps to explain their success in this setting. In Holland by the 1670s, such pictures were crowded out by overproduction; in England, they retained cultural prestige because they were linked to continental models, Italy above all, and fitted comfortably into the classical language of country house interiors. They carried the aura of antiquity and pastoral order, projecting cultivation without demanding the intellectual engagement of history painting. They were also safe. Unlike overtly religious images, they avoided confessional controversy in a fragile Restoration settlement; unlike mythological scenes, they carried no risk of excessive nudity or erotic display. Arcadian pastorals offered an idealised vision that was neutral yet cultivated, decorative yet resonant.
The Ham House ensemble shows how Dutch painting, even at its middling levels, could be exported as cultural capital, fitted into aristocratic schemes that required quantity as much as quality. At the same time, it reveals the precariousness of this migration: Dutch painters filled a niche in the London market, some establishing lasting careers, others working only briefly. The cycle therefore embodies both the dispersal of Dutch pictorial idioms abroad and the shifting hierarchies that marked the close of the Golden Age, when the Republic’s artistic surplus became an export commodity rather than a domestic necessity.
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with an Old Herdsman and Young Market Girl Fording a Stream followed by Two Horse-and-Carts with Grooms, c.1675, oil on canvas, 122 × 203 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Mountainous Landscape with a Caravan, 1675–1677, oil on canvas, 134.6 × 180.3 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with Ruins, a Tomb, Herdsfolk, Sheep and Goats, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124.5 × 167.6 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with Figures, Horses and a Dog, and Ruins in the Distance, 1665–1690, oil on canvas, 124.5 × 112 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with Figures, Cattle, Sheep, and a Castle in the Distance, 1670s, oil on canvas, 123 × 112 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), A Mother with Two Children, Two Cows, Sheep, and an Ass, in a Clearing outside a Cottage, 1670s, oil on canvas, 127 × 99 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with a Milkmaid milking a Cow, a Farm Dwelling, Cows, Sheep, and a Donkey, 1670s, oil on canvas, 127 × 99 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with Mercury and Battus and Animals, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), An Old Woman and a Young Girl in a Garden (Vertumnus and Pomona, with Juno’s Peacock), 1670s, oil on canvas, 112 × 99 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Herdsman, Horseman and Cattle, 1670s, oil on canvas, 40 × 99 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Night Scene with Figures grouped around a Fire, 1670s, oil on canvas, 40 × 99 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), A Landscape with a Shepherd under an Awning surrounded by Sheep and a Goat, 1670s, oil on canvas, 40 × 99 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with Nursing Herdswoman, Sleeping Herdsman and a Cow, a Horse, and Sheep, 1675, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with a Herdsman leading a Staling Mule, a Goat, Dog, Cattle and Sheep, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with Cattle, Sheep, a Horse, a Goat and a Courting Couple of Rustics, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), A Pair of Lions with a Leopard in a Cave, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Figures spearing a Lion devouring a Fallen Rider, with a Dead Lion and other Horsemen, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, London
