Many of the Dutch paintings at the National Gallery of Art have fascinating histories. Curator Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. recounts how, under the threat of the Third Reich, the Petschek family in Aussig (now the Czech Republic) saved their beautiful landscape by Albert Cuyp from the Nazis.  Wheelock also relates the peaceful, Arcadian quality of Cuyp’s paintings to the political and social ideals of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century.