When it comes to painting, the Netherlands has always belied its reputation as a sober, sensible, slightly dull nation whose culture is as antiseptic as the front steps that its people wash down every morning. That was never true, of course — even the Dutch national football team (which has its own recently published book, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer) is known for its flair. The Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam is one of the world’s finest symphony orchestras (and Ludwig van Beethoven at least has a Dutch name). But when it comes to painting, the names Van Eyck, Bosch, Bruegel, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Van Gogh bespeak a legacy that even France and Italy might envy.

You won’t find many of these names in the show that’s just opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, " The Poetry of Everyday Life: Dutch Painting in Boston. " Indeed, you may not find any works you’ve ever seen before, even in reproduction. For this exhibit, the MFA drew exclusively on 17th-century paintings from private collections in the Boston area. With some 60 pieces and, apart from Rembrandt (one work), no artist more famous than Jacob van Ruisdael, " The Poetry of Everyday Life " has no pretensions to summer-blockbuster status (that would be " Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collection, " which opens July 28). Yet 60 works is a good size, satisfying but not overwhelming. And the MFA, which back in 2000 gave us the fine " Van Gogh to Mondrian: Dutch Works on Paper, " delivers on the title here: as these paintings attest, the Dutch have a particular gift for discovering the poetry in the everyday.

The show is apportioned among three rooms, by genre: figures; landscapes; architecture and still life. Only the landscape room really coheres, but it would be hard to suggest an alternative, and curator Ronni Baer has created some edifying juxtapositions. In the figure room, Dirck Hals’s Merry Company hangs next to Pieter Jansz. Quast’s Peasants in an Interior. Hals’s high-life painting depicts an elaborately costumed quartet: a woman playing the lute, a man with a bass viol, and another man and woman standing outside. They’re outdoors, on a sort of terrace, and behind them a servant is putting out food on a white tablecloth, including a peacock pie. Quast’s peasants are in a stable: a woman holding a child, who’s urinating; a man peering into a capacious jug to see whether it’s truly all gone; a couple in the hay doing what couples do in the hay, with a goat nearby to remind you what that is. There’s no condescension in Quast’s painting — on the contrary, it’s Hals’s quartet who look just the least bit apprehensive, as if wondering whether all their luxury is real.

There are two versions of the Abraham and Isaac story here, and at first glance it seems odd that Baer has separated them with Rembrandt’s The Apostle James Major (a painting you may have seen on loan at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Executed in 1625, Moses van Uyttenbroeck’s The Sacrifice of Isaac shows a naked Isaac in prayer, eyes raised to Heaven, and a humbly dressed Abraham in jerkin and sandals who drops the knife as a down-to-earth angel intervenes by putting a hand on his chest. The picture space is horizontal, and though the grouping of the three figures on the right side makes room for lots of roiling green sky to the left, it’s Scripture on a human scale that doesn’t look so very different from Arie de Vois’s Minerva and the Muses on the other side of the room. The Apostle James Major could remind you of Abraham praying to God, but the real reason it’s here is to show how Rembrandt’s more realistic (just look at James’s hands) and yet mystic (he seems to emerge out of the dark void, or is he returning into it?) style, the intersection of the timeless with time, influenced Dutch painting thereafter. No date is given for Nicolaes Maes’s The Sacrifice of Isaac, but Maes lived from 1634 to 1693, so he would have had Rembrandt’s example before him. And the painting itself dispels any doubt, with its dark, exotically dressed and turbaned Abraham, its barely emergent angel high above, and most of all its recumbent and spotlit Isaac, his hands behind his head, as if he were Christ being nailed to the cross.

Isaak Koedijk’s The Foot Operation points the way to the landscape room, and not just because the open window gives a glimpse of the street outside. It’s in the way Koedijk balances contact with outreach, with the surgeon and the patient, whose foot he bandages with skill and solicitude, set against a visual record of the surgeon’s interests: a violin, a book, a globe on the table, a stuffed crocodile on the wall, and above that a collection of fearsome weapons. There’s also a birdcage, its door open. Has the bird escaped?

What’s striking about the landscape room is that every painting here has figures in it, though some are so tiny that they’re barely detectable. It’s as if the artists were trying to measure our place in the world. Esaias van de Velde’s Cavaliers Riding by a Stream accords us a reasonably important role, the cavaliers in harmony with the sylvan landscape, though the smaller figure in the distance might be wondering how far they dare go. Van de Velde’s Winter Landscape is a more humbling depiction, with its anonymous figures making their way along the ice; yet the nearby houses promise warmth, food, and companionship, and light suffuses the sky.

In most of these landscapes, however, the figures confront the vastness of a forbidding but also promising nature in a way that anticipates Caspar David Friedrich and later Vincent van Gogh. What looks like a church in the distance in Pieter van Santvoort’s Landscape might be the focal point for his disparate figures; in Jan van Goyen’s Landscape, the three figures seem to find their home outdoors (a frequent Friedrich motif) rather than in the distant house. The travelers of Van Goyen’s Landscape with Coach and Figures by an Inn, on the other hand, have an uncertain prospect; the inn looks distinctly more inviting. In Van Goyen’s View of Rhenen, the town with its church anchors the figures along the shore; in Johannes Goedaert’s Landscape with Cottages, it’s the cottages that sustain the woman in the foreground. More or less hopeful variations on this theme recur in the works by Salomon van Ruysdael, Herman Saftleven, Joris van der Haagen, Aert van der Neer, and Philips Koninck; it’s summed up in the six paintings by Jacob van Ruisdael that Baer has placed along one wall, stormy landscapes whose human figures fight for significance.

The still lifes and the architectural paintings restore that sense of significance, though not without ambivalence. Pieter Claesz.’s Still Life with Peacock Pie (the peacock decoration here rendered far more convincingly than in Dirck Hals’s Merry Company) promises the good things that life can afford while acknowledging, in the half-eaten bread and the peeled lemon, our transience. The half-eaten pie that anchors his Breakfast Piece begs the question of how much is left. The sustenance of Willem Claesz. Heda’s Still Life with Glasses and Tobacco is restricted to olives and lemons, and the silver goblet is overturned. No less unsettling are the flower arrangements by Ambrosius Bosschaert, Hendrick de Fromantiou, Rachel Ruysch, and Jan van Huysum, gorgeously delineated beauty that won’t last.

Perhaps that’s why the architecture is church architecture. Pieter Saenredam’s Interior of St. Bavo, Haarlem and Emanuel de Witte’s Interior of the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam are complementary. In both paintings, you can see a figure in the pulpit, the Word as the focus of Christian worship in the Netherlands. But the Oude Kerk, with its portrait group at left center, is church as social gathering, whereas St. Bavo is filled with divine light. Jan van der Heyden’s View of the Westerkerk, Amsterdam wraps it up with a church exterior that fuses Heaven and Earth, the Word made flesh in the butcher shop that lies in the church’s shadow. If there can be poetry — or redemption — in a flayed carcass, the Dutch will find it.