Questioning Pictorial Genres In Dutch Seventeenth Century Art

Church interiors, cortegaerdjes, scenes of everyday life, tronies, landscapes, spoockerijen, group portraits, bambocciate, hunting scenes, history paintings, sottoboschi, still lives and many other subjects: the wide variety of pictorial genres and sub-genres in which Dutch artists specialized is a key component in our perception of Dutch seventeenth-century art. Yet the epistemological framework constituted by genre definitions, conventions and hierarchies is far from self-evident, nor does it necessarily reflect how people in the seventeenth-century thought about artworks. In fact, art literature of the period is largely silent on these matters and artists do not appear to have followed an established set of principles. This volume examines the way pictorial genres can be, and have been, defined by artists, theorists, audiences and art historians; how individual artists conceived the subject matter of their artworks; and how society and the art market contributed to the development of certain subjects. As such, it embraces the complex and often messy reality of pictorial genres in seventeenth-century Dutch art.

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.

Despite the tremendous number of studies produced annually in the field of Dutch art over the last 30 years or so, and the strong contemporary market for works by Dutch masters of the period as well as the public's ongoing fascination with some of its most beloved painters, until now there has been no comprehensive study assessing the state of research in the field. As the first study of its kind, this book is a useful resource for scholars and advanced students of seventeenth-century Dutch art, and also serves as a springboard for further research. Its 19 chapters, divided into three sections and written by a team of internationally renowned art historians, address a wide variety of topics, ranging from those that might be considered "traditional" to others that have only drawn scholarly attention comparatively recently.

Historians and art historians provide a critique of existing methodologies and an interdisciplinary inquiry into seventeenth-century Dutch art and culture.

Consists of articles by the author, originally published individually between 1968/69 and 1993.

Catalogus bij een tentoonstelling van 143 Nederlandse 17e eeuwse schilderijen uit Engels openbaar bezit.