Beholding the beholder: The reception of “Dutch” painting

In memoriam Sixten Ringbom, 1935-1992

Abstract

While a lucid and understandable interpretation can be given for most pictures, “typically Dutch” paintings (i.e. seventeenth-century genre and still-life pictures) seem to allow for or even demand some measure of freedom for the beholder. The cause of this ambiguity lies in the typically Protestant disregard for works of art and in a concomitant characteristic of these works: they address the viewer in an “ethical” manner.