Browse by time · decade
1630s
1630 – 1639
Showing 57 works across all media from the 1630s
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp
1632 · Mauritshuis, The Hague
Rembrandt was twenty-five and new in Amsterdam when the surgeons' guild hired him, and he built every head in the room around one lifted tendon.
★ 8.8
The Surrender of Breda
1635 · El Prado, Madrid
The Spanish general stops the defeated Dutchman from kneeling and lays a hand on his shoulder. Spaniards still call the picture The Lances.
★ 8.8
Wind God and Thunder God (Fujin Raijin-zu)
1630 · Kyoto National Museum, Kyoto
The two gods hurtle in from opposite edges and Sotatsu leaves the whole middle empty, so the bare gold reads as sky.
★ 8.2
Et in Arcadia Ego (Poussin)
1638 · Louvre, Paris
Shepherds trace the carved words on a tomb, Even in Arcadia I am here, and Poussin lets death speak without raising its voice.
★ 7.5
Christ Crucified
1632 · El Prado, Madrid
No crowd, no landscape, nothing but the body against black, with the hair fallen forward to half-cover the face. Made for private prayer.
★ 7.3
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
1633 · Stolen
Rembrandt's only seascape, and one disciple is being sick over the side. Stolen from the Gardner Museum in 1990 and never recovered.
★ 7.2
The Anatomy of Melancholy
1638 · 547 pages
Melancholy comes from everything, the Oxford scholar Robert Burton concludes, from diet and air to love and religion. A thousand pages of quotation follow, and his one prescription is not to be idle.
★ 7.2
Discourse on Method
1637 · 207 pages
Good sense is the most equally distributed thing in the world, Descartes begins, then shows how to use it: doubt all you can, divide each problem, and rebuild only on what survives.
★ 7.1
Life is a Dream
1635 · 96 pages
Spanish Golden Age drama peaks here. King Basilio locks his newborn son in a tower to outrun a prophecy, then has him drugged, brought to court, and told it was a dream.
★ 7.0
The Merry Drinker
1630 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
He raises his glass and talks straight at you, painted in slashing strokes laid down about as fast as the moment they catch.
★ 6.9
Philosopher in Meditation
1632 · Louvre, Paris
Daylight from a window, firelight from a hearth, and a great spiral staircase winding up into the dark between them.
★ 6.9
1630
The Fortune Teller (de la Tour)
1630 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
While the old woman reads his palm, three young accomplices are quietly taking his purse and lifting a medal off his neck.
★ 6.8
The Israelites Gathering Manna
1639 · Louvre, Paris
Poussin laid the crowd out like a relief so each gesture reads separately, one woman so hungry she nurses her own mother.
★ 6.7
Sacrifice of Isaac
1634 · Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
An angel grabs Abraham's wrist and the knife is still falling through the air, his hand clamped over the boy's face.
★ 6.7
Meagre Company
1637 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Hals left this militia portrait unfinished and another painter finished the right-hand figures, a join you can still see if you look.
★ 6.3
Saturn Devouring His Son (Rubens)
1636 · El Prado, Madrid
Saturn bites into his own infant to stop the prophecy, the star of Saturn overhead. Goya would take the same subject somewhere much worse.
★ 6.3
The Massacre of the Innocents (Rubens 2)
1638 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Rubens came back to the subject nearly thirty years later with the same fury and a much broader, more fluent hand.
★ 6.1
Vanitas Still Life
1630 · Mauritshuis, The Hague
A toppled glass, a lamp still smoking, a watch and a skull, all painted in browns and greys so the light does the work.
★ 6.1
Three Major Plays
1631 · 300 pages
Lope de Vega wrote hundreds of plays and handed Spain a national theater. In Fuente Ovejuna a village murders its tyrant lord, and under torture every villager claims the killing for the town.
★ 6.0
Discourse on Method · 1637
Of Plymouth Plantation · 1630
Drink not the third glass, which thou canst not tame, When once it is within thee.
The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations · 1633
The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as the greatest virtues.
Discourse on Method · 1637
One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
Songs and Sonnets · 1631
The Harmony of the Muses · 1631
Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart Could have recover'd greennesse?
The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations · 1633
Grief melts away Like snow in May, As if there were no such cold thing.
The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations · 1633
Songs and Sonnets · 1631