SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY Holland was a land of blood, sweat and beers. It fought long and fiercely to win complete independence from Spain; it amassed huge wealth by energetic trading at home and around the world, and like the U.S. today it developed a dominant middle class with a uniquely high standard of living. Unlike middlebrow Americans, the Dutch in their golden age prized paintings highly enough to buy them. In some towns, professional painters outnumbered the butchers. Perhaps a score of the artists achieved greatness; the works of a handful rivaled and vastly enriched the art of the ages.

At Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum last week, 98 paintings from 17th century Holland went on display. The brilliant survey was borrowed from museums and private collections across Europe and the U.S., will be shown next year at Toledo and Toronto. As the color reproductions on the following pages demonstrate, the exhibition's minor pieces and masterpieces alike were made by men who had the skill and will to paint precisely what they saw. The Dutch of that day evidently saw things in sharp focus, with a calm objectivity foreign to subjective 20th century eyes.

Downright Men. But if the Dutch artists were wonderfully downright about their everyday world, they reflected a Dutch Protestant reluctance to accept sacred subjects and they avoided the upsetting, never-distant world of war and human suffering. Only Rembrandt had the courage to take all human life, spiritual as well as material, for his province. Rembrandt overshadowed last week's exhibition, and also dominated its pendant show of Dutch prints and drawings. Rembrandt's etching Faust (above) asserts a force of imagination foreign to his environment. With such pictures, Rembrandt outstripped even the glorious age into which he had been born. In advancing his art beyond fashionable portraiture, Rembrandt chose poverty, increasing neglect, and immortality.

Jan Steen, too, had trouble making ends meet. But Steen was content to eke out his living as a brewer and innkeeper. Frans Hals, as great a virtuoso of the brush as ever lived, put clear understanding into his Jolly Toper (opposite). The Toper (which remarkably resembles Actor Van Heflin in the role of Athos of the Three Musketeers) has the eyes and mouth of any man on the higher slopes of inebriation. If universality was Hals's hallmark, particularity was that of Pieter de Hooch. Not one artist working today could make a tennis match on a Westchester estate, for example, come as alive as De Hooch's Game of Skittles.

Game of Skittles. Instead of outstripping his time like Rembrandt, or capturing it like De Hooch, Jan Vermeer distilled it. Vermeer's pictures are even cooler, steadier and more meticulous than the customers called for. As Curator Theodore Rousseau remarks in the exhibition catalogue, almost everything Vermeer painted has a "quality of classical repose and silence. It remains one of the inexplicable puzzles in the history of taste that [Vermeer's pictures] have been confused with works by other artists, and that the identity of this painter, who to us seems different from all others, should have been lost for more than a century."

Romantic Shipowners. The pride the Dutch felt in their newly liberated land led some farmers to collect Dutch landscapes. But the wealthy merchants preferred the mountainous, Italianate variety of landscapes then in vogue, and so Meindert Hobbema's gentle studies of his home ground did poorly. He finally gave up art. Seascapist Jan van de Capelle (a part-time dyer) died rich: his silvery, cloud-filled vistas of the North Sea apparently satisfied a hidden romanticism in Holland's shipowners.

Around the turn of the century, the art of Holland's golden age was much admired in the U.S.; since then its popularity has waned. The Metropolitan's show will doubtless do much to bring Dutch art to the fore again. Contemporary artists may find little in it that can be of use to their more subjective purposes, but they are specialists. Laymen wandering through the exhibition simply to enjoy the views will tread one of the highest and broadest plateaus in the history of art.

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