"Seashore at Scheveningen"

Jan van Goyen - huile
In Holland in the seventeenth century it was customary for painters to specialize in one field, or even one subject. Painters who specialized in figure painting sought the help of another artist for the execution of a landscape, while the landscape painter would often ask a colleague to paint the human or animal figures or still-lifes that he wanted to include in his composition
it was very seldom that anyone who had established his name in a certain field was prepared to undertake a different kind of work. In fact specialization was carried to such lengths that some artists did not paint landscapes in general but restricted themselves to seascapes, twilight landscapes, townscapes or churches.