Academic literature on the topic 'Seventeenth century Dutch art'

This thesis examines how comic images are used in Dutch Golden Age art. No comprehensive study of this subject exists, in spite of the fact that comic themes and tropes are widely used by Dutch artists, as part of a culture which enjoyed but also valued humour for its rhetorical, instructional and therapeutic utility. Referring to recent scholarly interest in the field of comic culture, and using an interdisciplinary approach combined with iconographic analysis, comic elements in the images are examined in the context of wider comic culture including comedy, farce, rogue literature and joke books, and in relation to the tastes and the ideology of the burgher class, as well as to contemporary notions of wit or geestigheid in art. These investigations are related to major theories of the comic. Particular areas examined are the comic representation of peasants, merry companies, stereotypical characters and situations, and the archetypal relationship of the trickster and the dupe which was the essence of farce. This reveals the strength of traditional tropes and stereotypes involving folly, deception and concealment, modernised to provide a pictorial 'comedy of manners' for the burgher class, who also purchased comic images evoking differentiation and social exclusion. One conclusion is that comic themes in Dutch art should be considered within the long sixteenth century. Another is the value of the application to paintings of a social and anthropological theory of the comic as expression of symbolic social structure, experienced through behaviour codes, which sees it as always significant, being a means of communication within a group or culture, and never value-free even when no didacticism is apparent. This can help to illuminate important art-historical debates such as those involving the relationship between amusement and instruction, meaning and ambiguity, and questions of reception and spectatorship.

The seventeenth century saw a large increase in family-related portrait materials, including group family portraits, family portrait collections, and family memorial albums. In this thesis, I contend with the meanings and functions of family portraits created in the Netherlands in an attempt to illuminate the motives behind the rise in the number of portraits of the family during this period. I focus on the ways in which Dutch families utilised portraiture as a vehicle for constructing personal and national identity. In an age of extraordinary economic success, religious tension, and political upheaval, portraits of the members of the expanding Dutch ‘middle class’, who had the means and the desire to commission them, reveal a conscious inclination to define and substantiate a fashioned identity as the new urban elite of a Republic in the making. My study assesses family portraits as sites where identity and changing notions of selfhood were envisioned and performed. The shifting notions of ‘family’, and the increasing popularity of commissioning portraits seems to signal attempts to configure and imagine their relationship to Dutch society. I propose that the amount of portraits related to the family commissioned alongside an exploration of and struggle with identity is a symptom of the anxiety surrounding politics, religion, and social changes, for which the family often served as a metaphor. New perspectives on portrait theory and identity, especially those of Ann Jensen Adams and Joanna Woodall, contributed to the shaping of this thesis, particularly as a means to comprehend how portraits functioned in the lives of families. There are four chapters that make up the body of this thesis. In each chapter, I focus on specific works of art chosen for their suitability in highlighting certain concepts and anxieties about identity and the family in its cultural context at their extremes.

The seventeenth century was an incredibly fascinating time for art in England developmentally, especially because most of the artists that were receiving the commissions from English patrons and creating the art weren’t English, they were Dutch. Over this one hundred year period scores of Dutch artists migrated over from the Dutch Republic and showed England this Golden Age of painting that had established Dutch artists back in the Netherlands as pioneers in their line of work. In studies of Anglo-Dutch art, portraiture is a genre that has been widely researched; Peter Lely (a Dutch-born portraitist) is one of many widely acclaimed artists of this genre; comparative to many of the artworks and artists chosen for this research. Generally Anglo-Dutch relations, politically, economically, religiously and of course culturally there was, during the seventeenth century, so much going on between these two nations. Did this intense ever-changing relationship have an impact on that the other ‘low’ genres of art that was produced throughout this century? This research involves understanding and thinking about the impact of the cultural exchange that took place between England and the Netherlands in the seventeenth century on ‘low’ art – marine, landscape and still life painting. This research entails thinking about the origins of these genres as well as looking at individual paintings on a detailed basis and understanding how this cultural interchange manifests and translates itself through visual motifs – objects (large and small), stylistic characteristics and theme of the painting. Various themes and interpretations - in particular iconography and iconology, descriptive versus narrative art and national identity - have been explored and considered in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the literature that already exists for this art in an effort to consider something new but to also interpret the paintings in a different way – this research has considered these paintings through the visual elements and has explained the cultural significance they provide.

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2007.<br>Thesis research directed by: Dept. of Art History and Archaeology. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.

This study explores how illicit transatlantic trade relations with the Dutch in seventeenth-century Virginia can be identified through the material record. The research was motivated by recent excavations at a seventeenth-century plantation on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Eyreville, as it is now known, was a hub of transatlantic trade during the formative years of the Virginia colony. The recognizable presence of Dutch trade goods, coupled with the site’s pro-Dutch merchant residents, prompted the investigation into material signatures of illicit trade on the Eastern Shore and the Chesapeake. The identification of these material signatures is based on extensive research into geopolitical histories, trade networks, the production and distribution of trade goods, and archaeological evidence. This is achieved through the lens of network analysis and structuration theory. Combined with a rich documentary record, archaeological and artifactual analysis illuminates the effects of European globalization, specifically conflicts such as the War of Three Kingdoms from 1642-1649, and regulations such as those imposed through the British Navigation Acts and by the Dutch West India Company. Considering the complexity of this historical context and the modes of analysis involved, a multiscalar approach/perspective is key to discerning how these trade relations occurred.

The objective of my research is to develop a body of work for exhibition based on an examination of the ways that corporate space, as exemplified by the foyers and conference rooms of contemporary corporate offices, reflect societal anxieties about wealth and power. These works will draw on the history of painting, with particular reference to 17th century Dutch still life painting, as a framework within which to conduct the exploration of contemporary space. This will be done by applying or interpreting the principles, motifs and techniques used in that period in the visual representation of the connection between wealth and decadence and western culture's ambiguous attitude towards the creation and accumulation of wealth. Boardrooms, corporate foyers and office interiors have developed into instantly recognisable types of space with a particular atmosphere, typified by large empty space and the use of materials such as marble and granite and surfaces with reflective finishes.. These spaces are often open to the public, but the intention is for people to be impressed by the wealth and power of the occupants, an idea initially perfected in Ancient Rome. The impression of wealth and power created in these spaces is balanced against a need to demonstrate prudence and restraint - the corporations need to avoid creating an impression of extravagance or wastefulness. The emergence of the genre still life painting in the Netherlands during the 17th century provides useful source material for their representations of restrained prosperity as well as the moral content related to the virtues of modesty and the transience of material life and wealth. The illusory space in the church interiors of Saenredam and de Witte, with their sense of expansive space and light, are echoed in the real space of contemporary corporate foyers and provide a basis for considering the format, composition and modes of representation of constructed space.

The still life genre has been, and arguably still is, regarded as the lowest form of painting in Western fine art history. The absence of the human figure in still life painting means that the artist does not require knowledge of either human anatomy or history for the production of the work. Given seventeenth century female painters' exclusion from the academies where anatomy was taught, it was thus a genre regarded as appropriate for female painters in Europe prior to the nineteenth century. Such dictates of propriety were indicative of gender constructs that relegated women to the private sphere of society and the domestic environment. As an accompaniment to my Masters in Fine Art exhibition titled Masters, Master, Masturbate (A master's debate), this text explores what still life painting may reveal about the relationship between the home, the body and the self in the present day. Produced from my position as a contemporary, white, female painter of Dutch descent raised within an Afrikaner culture in the context of South Africa, I suggest that a critical reconsideration of this apparently constrictive genre offers potentially liberating perspectives of gender constructs and the female painter.