17TH-CENTURY DUTCH SCHOOL Market Scene Oil on canvas 71.50 x 97 cm Trace of a signature at the bottom centre This market scene unfolds along a narrow strip. Wedged between the earthy expanse of the foreground and the mass of a stormy sky, these figures seem confined to a space that overwhelms them, to the extent that their activities might appear irrelevant, as if the painter wished to give precedence to a natural world within which humankind occupies a lesser place. Here, a few scattered buildings alternate with temporary tents. It is market day, but in an unspecified location, some distance from the town, whose tower and bell tower can be glimpsed in the distance. Reinforcing this rural setting, the palette of ochre and brown tones blends the vegetation, the men and their dwellings into a single earthy atmosphere. Moreover, the presence of red in the cloak of the man on the left conferring upon him a distinctive role—that of some wealthy figure who has come to buy a horse from the horse dealer with whom he is speaking. It does, in fact, appear to be a horse market, as suggested by the three horses in the foreground. In keeping with a pictorial approach characteristic of 17th-century Dutch painting, this composition gives primacy to the sky by reserving two-thirds of the canvas for it. Somewhere between genre scene and landscape, painters developed, in fact, a whole range of subjects in which precise observation of nature enabled them to capture the flatness of their landscapes with their imposing skies as well as the daily activities of their contemporaries, which were not without a certain triviality. For the choice of the Reformed faith by the United Provinces determined the subjects to be depicted. The ban on painting the divine figure and his assembly of saints was offset by more prosaic subjects, thus giving rise to genre scenes and landscape painting, as well as still lifes with a vanitas feel. Although secular in nature, whilst these new genres may occasionally convey moral or symbolic messages to their contemporaries, they now constitute first-rate testimonies to Dutch society, whose heyday in the 17th century earned it the title of the Golden Age.