Established following the 125th anniversary of the foundation of the Chair of Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh and named after the painter Sir John Watson Gordon, the Watson Gordon Lectures typify the long-standing and positive collaboration between the University of Edinburgh and the National Galleries of Scotland: two partners in the Visual Arts Research Institute in Edinburgh. This lecture, the second in the series, was given by MariA"t Westerman, then Director of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Professor Westermann is a widely-published scholar in the field of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Her highly stimulating lecture explored the pensive and the raucous, the reflective and the ribald, in an engagingly wide range of paintings. In association with the University of Edinburgh and the Visual Arts Research Institute in Edinburgh.