In the past several decades, major art exhibitions and significant scholarly publications on seventeenth-century Dutch paintings and prints of daily life have manifested the enthusiastic scrutiny of such imagery by scholars and the public alike. The thousands of seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings offer seemingly accurate views of daily life; however, as numerous scholars have addressed, the subject matter of such scenes has been selectively determined, resulting in the omission of many ordinary aspects of Dutch life. Scholars have posited various methodological approaches to recover the meaning and function of such images for their seventeenth-century middle- and upper-class viewers. In Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution, Wayne Franits provides the most comprehensive overview of such images to date. In addition to his well-written and fascinating text, the book boasts numerous stunning color illustrations and details. (And at 29 × 25 cm, the surface area of the book even evokes the actual dimensions of many small genre paintings, including twenty-five similarly sized pictures discussed in the publication.)

Franits organized the book’s eighteen in-depth chapters into three chronological parts as determined by economic, social, and political shifts and circumstances: 1609–48, 1648–72, and 1672–1702. Within this chronology, most chapters focus upon those artistic centers in which the exceptional painters flourished, while others examine individual artists who did not confine their productivity to one city. However, in dedicating comparable attention to genre paintings from the entire century, one wonders whether those painters who reached the “technical zenith, achieved by about 1660” (259–60)—for example, Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, Gabriel Metsu, and Johannes Vermeer—may have been shortchanged due to considerable discussion of imagery from the century’s end. Although Franits acknowledges that “the often stilted, restrained narratives of multi-figure genre paintings from this period [i.e., the end of the century] have been noted and construed in largely negative terms” (255), he nevertheless argues for their “continued vitality” (259).

Each of the three parts, and each chapter that focuses on an individual city, begins with a succinct, valuable account of the historical, political, economic, and religious circumstances that either spurred artistic efflorescence or spelled its decline. Throughout his chapters’ clear narrative, Franits addresses a complex constellation of historical circumstances; the demands of the art market; individual artists’ biographies, pictorial interests, and achievements; stylistic trends; iconographic themes; pictorial conventions; and an assessment of the sometimes-conflicting past and current interpretive scholarship. The latter provides the reader with a rich bibliography on numerous interdisciplinary topics.

Certain themes appear throughout Franits’s discussion, including: the role and longevity of the conventionality of style, motifs, and themes, a point that is reinforced by the author’s choice of paintings to examine; the multivalency of meaning; the critical role played by the art market; evolving domesticity; and the civilizing process and aristocratization among the elites. Additionally, Franits includes detailed information culled from sources that is sometimes obscure but no less fascinating, such as a reference to a rare extant paper crown from Twelth-Night celebrations (267); a discussion of “nose books,” which argued that the physical characteristics of a person’s nose reflected his or her temperament (43); the fact that the patrons of Dou and Vermeer were cousins (172); and that the camera obscura was not directly used to compose paintings until the eighteenth century (169).

While Franits’s book is an impressive and invaluable scholarly publication, his study, naturally, also raises various questions. How does the author specifically characterize the range of imagery one calls genre, originally a late-eighteenth-century French term (2)? In an introductory discussion, Franits states that genre imagery “transfigures the commonplace,” and he provides descriptive seventeenth-century terms for some genre subjects (1–2). However, the selection of those paintings under discussion in his book tacitly, yet more clearly, reveals the parameters of his working definition. All paintings under consideration except for one include human figures with compositional prominence. Thus, the presence of figures constitutes part of Franits’s implied definition of genre imagery. This is underscored in his discussion of Samuel van Hoogstraten’s painting, The Slippers, in which he states “what makes The Slippers so unusual is the conspicuous absence of human figures” (145). Similarly, in saying that Carel Fabritius painted only one genre work, The Sentry (158), Franits excludes from his definition of genre imagery both Fabritius’s painting of a small bird chained to its perch (Is it a still life even though the bird is alive?), and Fabritius’s View of Delft, which depicts musical instruments outside a shop against which rests a man with a view of the New Church (Is it a cityscape with genre elements? A genre scene set in a city?).

Franits’s selection of certain paintings reveals the seventeenth-century predilection for interior genre views and, secondarily, for outdoor genre scenes. The paintings included in his book repeatedly depict men and women in high and low milieux engaged in courting, drinking, eating, music-making, gaming, pimping, love-letter correspondence, domestic duties, and so on. The author’s interpretations often pivot upon issues of proper or improper modes of behavior, or some ambiguous combination. However, there are additional interpretive contexts, addressed by other scholars elsewhere, in which many of the featured genre paintings, as well as paintings not discussed, may be understood in ways not necessarily mutually exclusive with Franits’s interpretive focus. They include, for example, civic and national pride; scientific inquiry and collecting; trade and exploration; gender roles beyond those of courting and domesticity; the meaning inherent in spatial and perspectival complexities (rather than only “creative impulses” demonstrated therein (153)); and so on. Further, one wonders how to understand paintings not included in Franits’s study that combine genre subjects and elements from other artistic specializations, such as portraits, still lifes, cityscapes, landscapes, and the like.

Importantly, Franits argues that a painting’s possible meaning and function resulted from sometimes-conflicting influences. Such images, the meanings of which are often elusive today, satisfied an art market in which buyers purchased finished paintings with the potential to bear meaning that coincided with any number of worldviews and moral compasses. In order to explore such varied interpretive avenues, Franits evokes pictorial precedents; contemporary literature and theater; inscriptions on prints; songbooks; picaresque novels; proverbs; emblematic imagery; comic themes; crude visual metaphors; social treatises and tracts; time-honored motifs associated with certain psychological states, such as love; the subjects of paintings on the walls within paintings; and the pictorial style of a work.

Sometimes Franits considers the contradictory moralizing messages of such primary sources that have subject matter analogous to a genre painting, and he concludes that a clear interpretation cannot be made. Other times the author determines boldly that the moralizing meaning of a primary source actually corresponds with that of a similar subject in a genre painting. However, on what interpretive strategies does the author base his equivocal interpretations on one hand, and his unequivocal interpretations on the other? An example of the latter states: “the man’s thick garments, like those rendered by Maes and other seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters, therefore function as an attribute of senescence, alluding to frail health and, ultimately, to life’s impermanence” (151). Further, one wonders why the interpretive contexts in which some paintings are analyzed have been limited. In his discussion of Gabriel Metsu’s The Hunter, for example, Franits identifies a “male-female confrontation” (180), which he likens to a 1622 book in which “the poem could very well be describing Metsu’s painting and the frontispiece is strikingly similar as well: note the sewing basket and maiden reaching for a book to resist the man’s advances” (182). However, the unexplored context of hunting and its attendant associations (Who was allowed to hunt? Under what circumstances? To what end?) surely must also be relevant.

Although Franits has purposefully limited his study to paintings, he repeatedly and intelligently invokes sixteenth- and seventeenth-century prints as iconographic pictorial precedents, and sometimes as keys to understanding the meaning of paintings with similar subject matter. However, one wonders how, when, and why iconographic influence may have flowed in the other direction. Franits alludes to such reciprocity only once with regard to the influence of contemporary paintings on Adriaen van Ostade’s prints of domesticity (138). Further, although the author sensitively acknowledges the meaning inherent in the manner (style) in which a painting has been rendered, one wonders what differences in meaning result from the different media of a print and a painting, which share a subject in common.

Other questions arise. Franits repeatedly comes to astute conclusions about the various ways in which Dutch culture and society influenced the production and market for genre paintings, such as through the civilizing process. However, one wonders to what extent and in what ways did the style and themes of genre painting, in turn, inform cultural mores and social trends. Except for his brief discussion of domestic subjects by Pieter de Hooch and his contemporaries (162), the topic is not explored. One also wonders how female viewers, who may have been the paintings’ consumers, would have understood genre subjects other than ter Borch’s ladies in satin, who have already been addressed elsewhere.

Finally, such questions raised by Franits’s book in no way diminish his major contribution to the study of seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings. With insight and clarity, he has synthesized a wide range of relevant scholarship into a beautifully written and illustrated resource for scholars and other admirers of the alluring and often elusive scenes of daily life.