Though the physical landscape of Holland has always and obviously interested the Dutch, it became an object of wider admiration only during the 19th century, the Dutchest of all ages. This was the era in which the clear-eyed realism of the 17th-century Dutch landscape artists, inspired by a flat terrain and the bite of the northern air, influenced much of what was done in the Barbizon School in France and the Hudson River School in the New World. There were even scenes of Italy, painted by Italians of the time, made up to look suspiciously like the Lowlands.

“Time and Transformation in Seventeenth Century Dutch Art” provides some very fine examples of landscape paintings, drawings, and engravings from the 17th century, Holland’s Golden Age. The show is built around a theme, rather than a formal trope or a school. At first blush it appears to be a collection of only landscapes. But it includes a coda that contains, among other things, several still lifes with death’s heads in them, which take up the theme of time’s passing. It takes some getting used to before you realize that what connects Joachim Wtewael’s mannerist “Adoration of the Shepards” (1599) with Nicolaes Maes’s “Family Portrait” from 60 years later is that both depict ruins in the background.

Even if the thematic focus of this exhibition is not particularly compelling, this is an admirable collection of images, especially impressive for a small but highly ambitious museum like Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. The exhibition’s consideration of time and transformation is divided into five subtopics: depictions of monumental ruins, rustic ruins, scenes of disaster, scenes of Italy, and finally the still lifes.

The catalog essay by the show’s curator, Susan Donahue Kuretsky, a professor in Vassar’s art history department, contends that what is unique to Dutch (and to a lesser degree Flemish) art of this time is a temporal specificity new to Western painting. The great wellsprings of art during the 17th century were in Italy. Despite outcroppings of realism in a few, but not all, of the paintings of Caravaggio and his followers, their art tends toward generality and ahistorical abstraction.

In Dutch art, by contrast, there appears to have been a greater appreciation of the uniqueness of each passing moment. Ms. Kuretsky gives the example of a portrait by Hals, whose sitter looks “alive within the moment be cause the moment itself appears so specific: both instantaneous and fleeting.” That said, the landscapes of 17thcentury Holland rarely live up to the temporal specificity implied in Hals’s portraits. Some, like Vermeer’s great “View of Delft,” achieve it spectacularly, but most do not.

Even one of the great masters of the genre, Jan van Goyen, is more apt to render the moods of a season or a time of day, rather than the specificity of any single instant. I have the strong sense that his “River Landscape” from 1648 was painted in a studio, miles from the actual site.The leaven of a literary, even a proto-Romantic temperament supervenes upon the register of meteorological data that are so dear to this artist.

Indeed, a whole subgenre of Dutch landscape painting during the 17th century was devoted to very unDutch, almost mythic scenes of Italy. In the present exhibition, a fine and typical example, rich in the enameled colors of this school, is Bartholomeus Breenbergh’s “Landscape with Ruins,” from around 1630. Here peasants lounge around the sunlit Roman campagna before an ancient temple adorned with statues of Venus and a urinating Cupid.

There also emerged what we might call reportorial art, paintings and engravings that recorded some natural or man-made disaster. Given the prevalence of these scenes of bursting dykes, fires, and – best of all – the massive explosion of a munitions factory in Delft in 1654, we may imagine that the Dutch loved this sort of thing. One man in particular, Egbert van der Poel, surpassed all others as a professional crepe-hanger.

Indeed van der Poel was gleefully labeled “den besten Brantschilder van gansch Nederland,” “the best painter of fires in the entire Netherlands!” One of the finest works in the show, “Peasants Fleeing a Burning Barn” (1655), a nocturne, is a tonal masterpiece that runs the gamut of pale reddish browns before flaming into creamy incandescence along the roof of the burning building. In the foreground, peasants and (as always in Dutch art) cows can be seen heading for the tall timbers.

Yet even here one finds the levelheaded dispassion that is the defining element in Dutch art. It is a quality that survives intact, three centuries later, though in very different form, in the art of Mondrian. In this connection, it is perhaps suggestive that, although that cool and dispassionate “esprit geometrique” was famously invented by a Frenchman, Descartes, the only place in the world where he dared to commit it to print was on the presses of Holland.

Until June 19 (Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, 845-437-5632).