H. Perry Chapman

Eric Jan Sluijter

Mariët Westermann

Newark Museum

Cornelia Willemijn Fock

The caress of fabrics, the sheen of metal, the brittle luminosity of glass -- Dutch genre painters of the Golden Age were so skilled at mimicking the appearance of things that their largely imaginary domestic scenes are utterly convincing pictures of life as it was once lived. The contemporary viewer enters this world of make-believe as eagerly as Dorothy stepped into the land of Oz, with a complete trust in the fitness and accuracy of the illusion. Now, four eminent art historians reveal the trick behind this illusion and give us insight into the social reality that animates the deception. We learn why domestic interiors were a favorite subject for seventeenth-century Dutch artists and why buyers snatched up these paintings before their varnish dried. And we come to understand why these images of home and family, the earliest in the history of art, still speak to us three hundred years later in a voice as fresh and powerful as when they first appeared. This is the story of an art that echoed and shaped the ideals of an emerging nation -- a sensitive portrait of the painted fictions that laid the ground for our modern concept of "home" as the compass of our true selves. Book jacket.

Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt

Art & Home

North Carolina Museum of Art

Indianapolis Museum of Art

Dennis P. Weller

Cynthia von Bogendorf Rupprath

Jan Miense Molenaar

Currier Museum of Art

This volume looks at the work of Jan Miense Molenaer, an artist of the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer. He was probably a student of Hals and a spiritual heir of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Essays and plates focus on Molenaer's comic scenes of Dutch peasant life. His versatile work, painted in Haarlem and Amsterdam, also includes: portraits; gene scenes including peasant weddings, theatrical performances, religious narratives and children at school and play; and allegories. 92 colour & 128 b/w illustrations

Painter of the Dutch Golden Age

Jan Miense Molenaer

Mariet Westermann analyses Vermeer's work and his place in the history of art on the basis of Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum's four paintings, which span the range of his production from early to late, from cityscape to genre, from domestic chores to refined liv

Johannes Vermeer

The first comprehensive examination of the accomplishments of

"The art of the Dutch republic in the seventeenth century includes some of the most familiar and best-loved examples of European painting: exquisite still-life studies, tranquil interiors, robust portraits and rowdy tavern scenes. In this account, Mariet Westermann describes this art as it was experienced by the people of the period and as it appears to us today. She examines the major themes of Dutch art, including the growth and expression of national identity, the celebration and examination of the individual through portraiture, and the changing status of artists themselves."--BOOK JACKET.

The Art of the Dutch Republic, 1585-1718

The Dutch painter Jan Steen (1626-1679) has long enjoyed a reputation for his dissolute life, redeemed only by a keen eye for the follies of his contemporaries and an exquisite ability to capture his observations in paint. Steen's paintings of unruly households, rambunctious revels, and wily seductresses have come to define our image of the delicious and immoral excesses of the Golden Age. But rather than simply recording the illicit pleasures of Dutch burghers and peasants, Steen transformed them into ambitious genre paintings that rival the peasant epics of Bruegel the Elder and jest with the genteel idylls of Vermeer and Terborch. By placing Steen within Dutch society and culture of the seventeenth century, Mariet Westermann shows how the contradictions and parallels between his life and his art were essential to his innovative achievements. In a detailed analysis of his career and audience, she suggests how Steen became a comic painter and why his pictures appealed to prosperous urban connoisseurs. Documented throughout with seventeenth-century jokes, poems, and plays, The Amusements of Jan Steen gives the first full account of Steen's creative relationship to comic literature and performance.

Mariët Westermann

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