The Holy Family

This circa 1648 Holy Family at the Nivaagaard Museum demonstrates Bol's treatment of the most intimate Christian subject—Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus in domestic seclusion—with the warm chiaroscuro he inherited from Rembrandt's own treatments of the theme. Rembrandt's Holy Family paintings emphasized the human ordinariness of the divine family's life, and Bol continues this tradition: the carpenter's workshop setting, the tender maternal attention, the sleeping infant rendered with the quiet realism that distinguished Dutch Protestant religious painting from the theatrical grandeur of the Catholic Baroque. Denmark's Nivaagaard collection, assembled by the industrialist Johannes Hage, holds major Dutch Golden Age works.

The Holy Family is rendered with warm tones and intimate lighting characteristic of the Rembrandt school, the sacred subject treated with the domestic naturalism that made Dutch religious painting distinctive.