When the Thirty Years' War came to a close and the Treaty of Westphalia established both the principle of religious toleration and the establishment of the new Dutch Republic, painting in Northern Europe was revitalized with a new sense of purpose and possibility. Northern conventions in painting with their roots in the Flemish Renaissance- the landscape, the still-life, and the portrait- all underwent significant transformations which reflected the new climate of economic prosperity and the burgeoning national pride in the land's productivity and the Protestant peoples' industry. Artists like Hals, Vermeer, and Rembrandt brought sweeping changes to their works which forever changed the possibilities of what art could be and the forms which it could take, laying the foundations in many senses for how art is encountered in modern settings. Most of these we might take for granted; for example, next time you pose for a group photo, you have the early Dutch group portrait painters to thank for the development of this convention in imaging. The developments which we see in Dutch painting of the seventeenth century document some of the major currents of change which have shaped what we perceive to be the modern West today. The religious freedom which freed the Protestants from state-sponsored persecution at the conclusion of the Thirty Years War allowed a distinct religious climate and a new kind of artwork to flourish and to receive the lavish patronage which the Dutch Golden Age’s emerging global economy permitted. The image we have of the English King Charles I from Van Dyck is one of our last for the absolutist style of ruler in England; by and large, the bodies of parliament which establish the laws in modern Western countries are also emerging phenomena of this era. The desire for artwork in the homes of the growing middle class at the time anticipates the conventions for home decoration which we perhaps take for granted today; from seventeenth century Holland do we begin to see the consumption of artwork on such an equalized scale- from group portraits to scenes from every-day life with a coded moral- that we no longer can trace the phenomena of art history primarily through the lens of royal and elite patronage, as we have done so far in the art histories of Italy, France, England, and the other monarchies of Europe. With the establishment of the Dutch Republic so too did patterns of mass consumption become established which anticipated the common experience and interaction with images in the home and in the public sphere through the present day.