Atlantic West Europe (1636–1647): War, Economic Strain, and Cultural Resilience

The period 1636–1647 in Atlantic West Europe—comprising northern France, the Low Countries (the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg), and Atlantic-facing regions—was characterized by heightened involvement in the Thirty Years’ War, significant economic disruptions, intensified religious tensions, and enduring cultural vibrancy amid adversity. France emerged decisively as a leading European power, while the Dutch Republic continued its struggle for independence against Spain, profoundly impacting regional stability and development.

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Political and Military Developments

France: Direct Involvement in the Thirty Years’ War

• France formally declared war against Habsburg Spain (1635), initiating a prolonged and taxing military campaign that profoundly impacted northern France and the Low Countries.

• Cardinal Richelieu’s policies continued vigorously until his death (1642), followed closely by the death of Louis XIII (1643). The regency of Anne of Austria and ministerial leadership of Cardinal Mazarin sustained these war efforts.

• French victories, such as the decisive Battle of Rocroi (1643), showcased rising French military superiority and marked a pivotal decline in Spanish power.

The Dutch Republic: Persistent Conflict and Political Stability

• Under Stadtholder Frederick Henry of Orange (r. 1625–1647), the Republic sustained pressure on Spanish territories, notably capturing Breda (1637), consolidating northern control, and weakening Spanish dominance.

• Peace negotiations initiated at Münster (1646–1648) aimed to secure Dutch independence, reflecting growing war weariness yet underscoring Dutch diplomatic skill and resilience.

Spanish Netherlands: Military Struggles and Internal Tensions

• The Spanish Netherlands continued enduring heavy military conflict, economic strain, and political uncertainty under Spanish governance. Repeated incursions from France and the Dutch Republic exacerbated economic and social distress.

• Spanish military defeats, notably at Rocroi, signaled diminished Habsburg capacity to sustain effective control over the region.

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Economic Developments: Disruptions Amid Continued Prosperity

Fiscal and Economic Pressures

• Prolonged warfare severely strained regional economies, especially in northern France and Spanish-controlled Flanders, leading to widespread poverty, agricultural disruption, and economic hardship.

• Heavy taxation to support military campaigns created significant social unrest, particularly among rural populations in French territories, occasionally sparking local rebellions and uprisings.

Maritime Prosperity and Challenges

• The Dutch Republic maintained maritime trade dominance, with Amsterdam serving as a pivotal European financial and commercial hub. However, naval warfare and privateering posed increasing threats, prompting enhanced naval defenses.

• Northern French port cities—Bordeaux, Nantes, and Rouen—continued to thrive economically, benefiting from colonial commerce and the export of wine, salt, textiles, and other goods, despite ongoing warfare disruptions.

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Religious and Intellectual Developments

Heightened Religious Polarization

• The war intensified religious divisions, notably between Catholic-controlled Spanish Netherlands and predominantly Calvinist Dutch provinces. In France, Richelieu’s policies continued suppressing Protestant (Huguenot) political privileges, especially following the Siege of La Rochelle (earlier in 1628), effectively curtailing Protestant political influence through this period.

• Counter-Reformation Catholicism maintained a vigorous presence, reinforced by Jesuit educational establishments and widespread patronage of Baroque religious art, architecture, and rituals.

Intellectual and Scientific Advances

• Scientific inquiry continued to progress despite wartime disruptions. René Descartes published his landmark Discourse on Method (1637), influencing European thought profoundly, laying philosophical and methodological foundations of modern rationalism.

• Universities and scholarly societies flourished in Amsterdam, Leiden, and Paris, significantly advancing knowledge in philosophy, mathematics, medicine, and early natural sciences.

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Cultural and Artistic Flourishing Amidst Conflict

Baroque Artistic Golden Age

• Despite wartime adversities, Baroque art flourished spectacularly. In the Dutch Republic, artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Frans Hals, and Jan Lievens produced significant works, reflecting humanism, realism, and deep emotional expression.

• In the Spanish Netherlands, Peter Paul Rubens continued until his death (1640) as a dominant artistic figure, leaving an enduring legacy influencing European Baroque art profoundly.

French Cultural Patronage and Literary Growth

• French literature and theater thrived under royal patronage. Notably, playwright Pierre Corneille achieved fame with the influential drama Le Cid (1637), sparking lively intellectual and artistic debate.

• Paris became increasingly prominent culturally, reflecting French ascendancy in European art, literature, and intellectual circles, despite wartime challenges.

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Social and Urban Developments

Urbanization Amid Economic Challenges

• Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, and French coastal cities (Bordeaux, Nantes, Rouen) continued expanding despite economic strain, demonstrating urban resilience fostered by commercial prosperity and trade networks.

• The growing urban merchant class continued exerting economic influence, shaping regional economic policies, and contributing to the gradual transition toward mercantile capitalism.

Rural Hardship and Migration

• Continuous warfare, heavy taxation, and agricultural disruptions significantly impacted rural populations across northern France and the Low Countries, prompting rural-to-urban migration, increasing urban poverty, and social tensions.

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Legacy and Historical Significance

The period 1636–1647 in Atlantic West Europe was decisive for shaping European historical trajectories:

• Politically, French military successes and centralization under Richelieu and Mazarin positioned France as Europe’s leading power, signaling Spain’s decline and shifting regional balances.

• Economically, despite severe disruptions, maritime commerce, particularly in the Dutch Republic and northern France, demonstrated resilience and adaptability amid wartime challenges.

• Religiously, intensified polarization and Counter-Reformation rigor entrenched religious divisions deeply, foreshadowing later sectarian conflicts.

• Culturally, extraordinary Baroque artistic and literary achievements emerged despite warfare, reinforcing the region’s cultural centrality in European intellectual life.

Thus, by 1647, Atlantic West Europe had navigated immense challenges, establishing crucial foundations for subsequent political realignments, economic transformations, and cultural legacies integral to European history.

Claude Lorrain, born in 1604 or 1605 into poverty in the town of Chamagne, Vosges, in the Duchy of Lorraine; his actual name is Claude Gellée, but he is better known by the province in which he was born.

One of five children and an orphaned by the age of twelve, he had gone to live at Freiburg with an elder brother, Jean Gellée, a woodcarver.

He had afterwards gone to Rome to seek a livelihood, then to Naples, where he apprenticed for two years, from 1619 to 1621, under Goffredo (Gottfried) Wals.

Returning to Rome in April 1625, he had been apprenticed to Agostino Tassi; he once got into a fight with Leonaert Bramer, suffering numerous misadventures while managing to tour in Italy, France and Germany, including his native Lorraine, where

Claude Deruet, painter to the duke, kept him as assistant for a year; at Nancy, he painted architectural subjects on the ceiling of the Carmelite church.

Claude had returned in 1627 to Rome, where two landscapes made for Cardinal Bentivoglio had earned him the patronage of Pope Urban VIII.

From about 1637 he rapidly achieves fame as a painter of landscapes and seascapes.

Pieter de Grebber, the son of Frans Pietersz de Grebber (1573–1643), a painter and embroiderer in Haarlem, would have been taught painting by his father and by Hendrick Goltzius.

He is descended from a Catholic and artistic family: two of his brothers, and his sister Maria, the mother-in-law of Gabriel Metsu, were known as painters.

He is friendly with the priest and musicologist Jan Albertszoon Ban, and has had a poem set to music by the Haarlem composer Cornelis Padbrué.

Father and son had in 1618 gone to Antwerp and negotiated with Peter Paul Rubens over the sale of his 1615 painting Daniel in the Lions' Den.

The painting was then handed—via the English ambassador in the Republic, Sir Dudley Carleton—to king Charles I. Pieter has received important commissions not only in Haarlem, but also from the stadholder Frederik Hendrik.

As such, he has worked with on the decoration of the Huis Honselaarsdijk in Naaldwijk and at the Paleis Noordeinde in Huis ten Bosch in the Hague.

He paints altar pieces for churches in Flanders and hidden Catholic churches in the Republic.

He may also have worked for Danish clients.

De Grebber remains single and will live from 1634 until his death at the Haarlem Béguinage.

Besides history paintings, he also paints a number of portraits; furthermore many drawings and a few etchings by him have survived.

From different influences, such as the Utrecht Caravaggistism, Rubens and also Rembrandt, he has developed a very personal style.

He is, together with Salomon de Bray, the forerunner and first peak of the "Haarlem classicism" school, producing paintings characterized by a well-organized clarity and light tints.

The works of Poussin, who has throughout his life stood apart from the popular tendency toward the decorative in French art of his time, couple the surviving impulses of the Renaissance with conscious reference to the art of classical antiquity as the standard of excellence.

He values clarity of expression achieved by disegno or ‘nobility of design’ over colore or color, a concern which may be best appreciated in the line engraved copies of his works; Audran, Claudine Stella, Picart and Pesne are some of the most successfu among the many who reproduce his paintings.

Themes of tragedy and death are prevalent in Poussin's work, whose cerebral approach is exemplified ion Et in Arcadia ego, a subject he paints twice (the second version is seen at right); idealized shepherds examine a tomb inscribed with the title phrase, which is usually interpreted as a memento mori: "Even in Arcadia I exist", as if spoken by personified Death.

Most of the fresco cycles so numerous in early seventeenth century-Rome represent framed episodes imitating canvases such as found in the Sistine Chapel ceiling or in Carraccis' The Loves of the Gods in the Farnese gallery, completed in 1601.

Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini) had in 1633 commissioned Pietro da Cortona to paint a fresco cycle for the ceiling of their family palace.

The huge Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power, completed six years later, marks a watershed in Baroque painting.

Containing endless number of heraldic symbols and subthemes, the fresco is an illusion with the central field apparently open to the sky and scores of figures seen 'al di sotto in su' apparently coming into the room itself or floating above it.

By this time recognized among the top artists of his generation, Cortona had been elected during 1634-38 as director of Rome's Academy of St. Luke.

Claude Lorrain had apparently befriended his fellow Frenchman Nicolas Poussin, with whom he has traveled the Roman Campagna, sketching landscapes.

Though both have been called landscape painters, in Poussin the landscape is a background to the figures; whereas for Claude, despite figures in one corner of the canvas, the true subjects are the land, the sea, and the air.

By report, he often engages other artists to paint the figures for him, including Courtois and Filippo Lauri.

He remarks to those purchasing his pictures that he sells them the landscape; the figures are gratis.

Rembrandt and Saskia had moved in 1639 to a prominent house (now the Rembrandt House Museum) in the Jodenbreestraat in what is becoming the Jewish quarter; the mortgage to finance the thirteen thousand guilder purchase will be a primary cause for later financial difficulties.

He should easily have been able to pay it off with his large income, but it appears his spending always keeps pace with his income, and he may have made some unsuccessful investments.

It was here that Rembrandt frequently seeks his Jewish neighbors to model for his Old Testament scenes.

Although they are by now affluent, the couple has suffered several personal setbacks; their son Rumbartus had died two months after his birth in 1635 and their daughter Cornelia had dies at just three weeks of age in 1638.

They had a second daughter, also named Cornelia, who died in 1640 after living barely over a month.

Only their fourth child, Titus, who was born in 1641, will survive into adulthood.

Saskia will die in 1642 soon after Titus's birth, probably from tuberculosis.

Rembrandt's drawings of her on her sick and death bed are among his most moving works.

During Saskia's illness, Geertje Dircx is hired as Titus' caretaker and nurse and probably also becomes Rembrandt's lover.

She will later charge Rembrandt with breach of promise and be awarded alimony of 200 guilders a year.

Rembrandt will work o have her committed for twelve years to an asylum or poorhouse (called a "bridewell") at Gouda, after learning Geertje had pawned jewelry that had once belonged to Saskia, and which Rembrandt had given her.

Night Watch or The Night Watch or The Shooting Company of Franz Banning Cocq (Dutch: De Nachtwacht), the common name of one of the most famous works by Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn, may be more properly titled The Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch.

The painting is renowned for three elements: its colossal size (three hundred and sixty three by four hundred and thirty-seven centimeter, or eleven feet ten inches  by fourteen feet four inches), the effective use of light and shadow, and the perception of motion in what would have been, traditionally, a static military portrait.

This painting, completed in 1642, at the peak of the Dutch Golden Age, depicts the eponymous company moving out, led by Captain Frans Banning Cocq (dressed in black, with a red sash) and his lieutenant, Willem van Ruytenburch (dressed in yellow, with a white sash).

With effective use of sunlight and shade, Rembrandt leads the eye to the three most important characters among the crowd, the two gentlemen in the center (from whom the painting gets its original title), and the small girl in the center left background.

Behind them the company's colors are carried by the ensign, Jan Visscher Cornelissen.

The militiamen are also called Arquebusiers, after the arquebus, a sixteenth-century long-barrelled gun.

Night Watch is today on prominent display in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, being the most famous painting in their collection.

Alonzo Cano, a painter, architect and sculptor native to Granada, has been made first royal architect, painter to Philip IV, and instructor to the prince, Balthasar Charles, Prince of Asturias.

Hans Gillisz Bollongier, a specialist in bouquets of blooms, paints during a period of great productivity for Haarlem painters, during the decades after Karel van Mander published his Schilderboeck here.

In Karel van Mander's book, there were a set of rules to follow to create good paintings and good drawings.

Bollongier has developed his own style and still observes all of these rules.

His paintings are very popular, but his work is not regarded as such by contemporary Haarlem painters.

As a genre, still life painting is considered inferior to historical allegories.

His work today is considered part of the proof that the Tulip Mania actually took place, although there is reason to believe that this is also just part of early Haarlem tourist propaganda.

Even as early as the seventeenth century, gentry from Amsterdam, Leiden, and places farther away enjoy visiting the tulip fields of Haarlem in the spring.