Great Dutch Paintings From America

Essays by American and Dutch scholars and museum curators explore the collecting and reception of seventeenth-century Dutch painting in America, from the colonial era through the Gilded Age to today.

"The need for a guidebook enabling all those interested in Dutch art to find out at a glance which paintings and drawings by particular artists or which works of applied art of various periods are to be found in the major American public collections is so obvious that it comes as a surprise to discover that none as ever been written. Until now anyone wishing to know where Dutch art from past centuries or the not-so-distant past could be seen or studied had to rely on memory or hearsay, or had to consult the countless catalogues and publications of the far flung individual museums. Since a fundamental goal of American collecting has been to educate people about all cultures, Dutch art, like the art of so many other nations, is found in virtually every city and town across the country. . . Now we have a guide that tells us where to find the art that we seek and that gives us a lively but professional analysis of the historical significance of these treasures."--Preface

Heda's Banquet Piece, Frans Hals' Willem Coymans, and Rembrandt's Lucretia. Paintings by these and other masters attracted the American collectors P. A. B. Widener, his son Joseph, and Andrew W. Mellon, whose bequests form the heart of the National Gallery's distinguished and remarkably cohesive collection of ninety-one Dutch paintings.

Showcasing more than seventy paintings from public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe, Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914 explores the work of forty-three American artists drawn to Holland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Escaping from the rapid urbanization of their time, these artists established colonies in six communities in the Netherlands—Dordrecht, Egmond, Katwijk, Laren, Rijsoord, and Volendam—with all but Dordrecht being small, preindustrial villages. Inspired by their pastoral surroundings as well as the great traditions of seventeenth-century Dutch art and the contemporary Hague school, these American artists created visions of Dutch society underpinned by a nostalgic yearning for a premodern way of life. Some even alluded to America’s own colonial Dutch heritage, exploring shared histories and cultural connections between the two countries. Organized by the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, Dutch Utopia examines the appeal of Holland for American artists during this period, through six pivotal themes: the influence of seventeenth-century Dutch painting; the impact of the contemporary Hague School; antimodernism and the American Progressive Movement; points of convergence in national identities; the proliferation of artist colonies in Holland; and the popular construction of “Dutchness” beyond the stereotypes of wooden shoes and windmills. Dutch Utopia includes works by artists who remain celebrated today, such as Robert Henri, William Merritt Chase, and John Singer Sargent, and by painters admired in their own time but less well-known now. These include accomplished women such as Elizabeth Nourse and Anna Stanley, as well as George Hitchcock, Gari Melchers, and Walter MacEwen, who built international reputations with Salon pictures of Dutch landscapes and costumed figures. These artists were among hundreds of Americans who traveled to the Netherlands between 1880 and 1914 to paint and to study. Some lived in Holland for decades, while others stayed only a week or two, but most passed quickly through the major cities to small rural communities, where they created picturesque idylls on canvas.

An illustrated feast for the eye and intellect Dutch Art explores developments in art, art history, art criticism, and cultural history of the Netherlands from the artists' workshops for the Utrecht Dom in 1475 to the latest movements of the 1990s. it is lavishly illustrated with 147 black-and-white photographs and 16 pages in full color. More than 100 internationally recognized scholars, museum professionals, artists, and art critics contributed signed essays to this monumental work, including historians, sociologists, and literary historians.

The appealing genre paintings of great seventeenth-century Dutch artists - Vermeer, Steen, de Hooch, Dou and others - have long enjoyed tremendous popularity. This comprehensive book explores the evolution of genre painting throughout the Dutch Golden Age, beginning in the early 1600s and continuing through the opening years of the next century. Wayne Franits, a well-known scholar of Dutch genre painting, offers a wealth of information about these works as well as about seventeenth-century Dutch culture, its predilections and its prejudices. The author approaches genre paintings from a variety of perspectives, examining their reception among contemporary audiences and setting the works in their political, cultural and economic contexts. The works emerge as distinctly conventional images, Franits shows, as genre artists continually replicated specific styles, motifs and a surprisingly restricted number of themes over the course of several generations. Luxuriously illustrated and with a full representation of the major artists and the cities where genre painting flourished, this book will delight students, scholars and general readers alike.

Presents a catalog that surveys the Dutch paintings found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.