This dissertation argues that compositional shifts that appear in Dutch cityscape paintingsdepicting Haarlem and Amsterdam between 1650 and 1672 indicate cultural fluctuations thatimpacted expressions of urban citizenship. In the decades following the Protestant Reformationand the eighty-year revolt against Spain, Dutch academics and political reformers proposed arelationship between city and inhabitant structured around rationality, voluntary collectivism,and a desire for environmental and existential certainty. Chapter 1 evaluates texts that addressthe destabilizing effects of the war with Spain and the necessity to strengthen Dutch culture in itsaftermath. While written at different times between the start of the war in 1568 and theconclusion of the Stadholderless period in 1672, each of these texts written by various culturalreformers and critics, from the philologist Justus Lipsius, to the historian Caspar Barlaeus, andthe economist Pieter de la Court, propose a subjective engagement with Dutch cities and theirsystems of local government. Chapter 2 maps this trend toward subjective engagements withcultural and political institutions onto visual depictions of the Dutch cities of Haarlem andAmsterdam. Prints and then paintings of cities replace distanced compositional views with moresubjective views, where the features of the city are apprehended from fixed and specificlocations, emphasizing each city’s distinctive cultural character. Chapter 3 looks morespecifically at cityscape paintings produced between 1650 and 1672 to argue that paintersproduced images responsive to urban residents’ own developing sense of subjective intimacywith Amsterdam and Haarlem. These images provided a visual vocabulary to the desire forneostoic order and social collectivism expressed by Lipsius, Barlaeus, and the engineer SimonStevin. Chapter 4 considers how these paintings functioned as symbolic objects, arguing thatthey were physical expressions of urban citizenship and bourgeois social inclusion for theresident-collectors who ...