“History has never flourished in this country": Dutch Realism and the Making of History

In 1781, Sir Joshua Reynolds visited the major art collections of Holland. Prefacing his account of this tour, Reynolds dismissively asserted that “history has never flourished in this country.” This seemingly off-hand remark has a two-fold resonance: Reynolds laments the dearth of history painting in the Dutch context, and then goes on to describe Dutch realism as a non-historical and non-narrative form of painting. These observations are one of the earliest instances of a trend that continues to trouble methodological approaches to Dutch art, which is customarily defined in opposition to the Italianate genre of history painting. My paper will engage with the historiographic and methodological debates that have enlivened the field in order to reassess the fraught relationship between history and realism. Working from and against Eugène Fromentin’s influential claim that Dutch art “released itself from the obligations of history”, I will argue that by creating new viewing publics and practices, these non-narrative paintings of everyday life were in fact actively political in their engagement with history and played a key role in bringing about a historical transformation of the public sphere in the Dutch Republic.