Jacobus Vrel’s Dutch Neighborhood Scenes

Abstract

Jacobus Vrel’s mid-seventeenth-century paintings of close-up street scenes pictorially engage the intimate physical parameters and ambiance of the Dutch neighborhood rather than the city, as scholars have previously suggested. Close-up renderings of the elements of a neighborhood—part of a street, a row of houses and shops, quotidian activities—signify its characteristic insularity. Each neighborhood, with its own colorful name and official organization, which required membership of all residents, sought social control as well as the shared goals of friendship, brotherhood, unity, and honor. Vrel’s paintings idealistically embody and reinforce that paradigm.