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"What other people", wrote the nineteenth-century critic-politician Théophile Thoré, "has written its history in its art?" Unlike the art of Renaissance Italy, Dutch art, he thought, was so much the record of the here and now, of "la vie vivante," anchored in a specific time and place. It was the record of "the men and the matter, the sentiments and habits, the deeds and gestures of a whole nation." And the quality of social document inherent in much of Dutch art does indeed make it an irresistible source for the cultural historian. 
Treating art as a kind of historical evidence, though, has dangers for the unwary. Thoré also supposed it to be "a sort of photography of their great seventeenth century," a phrase that has been used time and again to suggest the kind of descriptive literalism that is supposed to reflect the empirical ethos of the prosaic bourgeois.There are undoubtedly some pictures that record with unmediated naturalism what was in front of the artist's eye. But in another passage Thoré reminded his readers that "nothing is less real than reality in painting. And what is called that depends strictly on a way of seeing." And unless one supposes baskets full of lepers' rattles or cripples' crutches to be typically suspended over Jan Steen's kitchen, it should be obvious that very many Dutch paintings, and even more engraved prints, filter the perception of the eye through the lens of moral sensibility. Even Jacob van Ruisdael, for example, was known to rearrange or invent landscape, most famously in his versions of The Jewish Cemetery, to accommodate symbolic rumination.