Compositional shifts that appear in Dutch cityscape paintings depicting Haarlem and Amsterdam between 1650 and 1672 indicate cultural fluctuations that impacted expressions of urban citizenship. In the decades following the Protestant Reformation and the eighty-year revolt against Spain, Dutch academics and political reformers proposed a relationship between city and inhabitant structured around rationality, voluntary collectivism, and a desire for environmental and existential certainty.

Chapter 1 evaluates texts that address the destabilizing effects of the war with Spain and the necessity to strengthen Dutch culture in its aftermath. While written at different times between the start of the war in 1568 and the conclusion of the Stadholderless period in 1672, each of these texts written by various cultural reformers and critics, from the philologist Justus Lipsius, to the historian Caspar Barlaeus, and the economist Pieter de la Court, propose a subjective engagement with Dutch cities and their systems of local government.

Chapter 2 maps this trend toward subjective engagements with cultural and political institutions onto visual depictions of the Dutch cities of Haarlem and Amsterdam. Prints and then paintings of cities replace distanced compositional views with more subjective views, where the features of the city are apprehended from fixed and specific locations, emphasizing each city’s distinctive cultural character.

Chapter 3 looks more specifically at cityscape paintings produced between 1650 and 1672 to argue that painters produced images responsive to urban residents’ own developing sense of subjective intimacy with Amsterdam and Haarlem. These images provided a visual vocabulary to the desire for neostoic order and social collectivism expressed by Lipsius, Barlaeus, and the engineer Simon Stevin.

Chapter 4 considers how these paintings functioned as symbolic objects, arguing that they were physical expressions of urban citizenship and bourgeois social inclusion for the resident-collectors who bought and displayed cityscapes in their homes.

The concluding chapter proposes additional topics of consideration, such as a comparison between Dutch and English pictorial expressions of urban citizenship and the extent to which these expressions were impacted by the political instability experienced by both cultures during the seventeenth century.