Group portraits, Molenaer & Dutch Golden Age

Group portraits in Holland

In The Group Portraiture of Holland, art historian Alois Riegl (18581905) argues that the artists of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Holland radically altered the beholders relationship to works of art. Group portraits by artists such as Rembrandt and Frans Hals reflect an egalitarian viewpoint not found in the more hierarchically structured Italian works of the same period. First published in 1902 and here in English for the first time, the book opened up areas of inquiry that continue to engage scholars today.
Group Portraiture of Holland by Alois Riegl
Getty Publications, 1999

Jan Miense Molenaer (1610-1668)

Jan Miense Molenaer (1610-1668), one of Holland's most innovative painters of the seventeenth century, has been largely obscured by the attention paid to his wife, the artist Judith Leyster. His accomplishments are considerable, however, as he treated an enormous range of subject matter in his pictures from the late 1620s to the 1660s. In addition to his early genre scenes in the style of his probable teachers Frans and Dirck Hals, Molenaer also painted religious narratives, complex allegories, portraits, village classrooms, and peasant celebrations. This diversity and the comic element he often brought to his imagery identify him as a worthy successor of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the true forerunner of Jan Steen.
Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age by Dennis P. Weller, Cynthia Kortenhorst and Mariet Westermann
Hudson Hills, 2002

Picturing Men and Women in the Dutch Golden Age

"The experience of a person today who views paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and other Dutch Old Masters differs radically from the experience of the Dutch man or woman who may have seen the same paintings three centuries ago. This book focuses on the way in which paintings were displayed and comprehended in seventeenth-century Holland. It offers many unexpected insights into life in the Dutch Golden Age as well as new ways of interpreting the paintings of this period."
Klaske Muizelaar and Derek Phillips closely examine who owned and who viewed paintings, where they were displayed, how accurately paintings portrayed their subjects, what functions paintings served, and how they reflected and influenced the lives of Dutch people of the time. Three centuries ago, museums did not exist and few paintings hung in the churches or public buildings of Holland. Most paintings adorned the homes of the wealthy. The authors consider the composition and development of Dutch society, particularly in Amsterdam, then examine life in affluent Dutch homes. They consider men and women as the producers, subjects, and viewers of art, uncovering assumptions about the nature of men and women, ideals of sexually appropriate conduct, and the actual sexual practices of everyday life. The book concludes with an examination of what is altered when works that were created to be viewed in the home become museum objects.
Picturing Men and Women in the Dutch Golden Age: Paintings and People in Historical Perspective by Klaske Muizelaar, Mary Jane Minkin and Derek Phillips
Yale University Press, 2003

Art and the Culture of Love in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting

Art and the Culture of Love in Seventeenth-Century Holland examines pictorial subjects and artists that have never been considered together and that collectively describe an important nexus of related themes in Dutch art of the Golden Age. Nevitt offers close readings of paintings and prints of "garden parties," merry companies, courting couples, and even landscape etchings with amorous references, taking seriously both the moral and the celebratory aspects of these images. Placing the works in the context of a contemporary culture of love, which manifested itself in the social practices of courtship and in a variety of amatory texts, he shows how certain pictorial traditions both reflected and shaped the experience of love.
Art and the Culture of Love in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting by H. Rodney Nevitt
Cambridge University Press, 2002

Journey through Landscape in Seventeenth-Century Holland

The sets of landscape etchings produced in the second decade of the seventeenth century by Claes Jansz. Visscher, Esaias van den Velde, Willem Buytewech, and Jan van de Velde drew on and contributed to a print culture that played a key role in defining "Dutch" landscape.
Examination of these printed landscape series as part of a wide-ranging print culture underscores the consistent interrelationship of landscape, history, and politics. To varying degrees, the contemporaneous descriptive geographies, histories, allegorical tableaux, didactic prints, and poetic anthologies considered in this study provide parallels for the prints' serial structure, journey theme, and commemorative motifs.
Moreover, as part of a wider enterprise of Dutch self-definition, they provide cultural guidelines for the interpretation of landscape in prints and paintings. Levesque's study of the Dutch seventeenth-century experience of place is two-tiered. She addresses the journey through landscape as an interpretive framework, the spatial structure of knowledge, the benefits of travel from the point of view of humanists, and the growth of a Dutch national self-consciousness expressed through landscape. She also provides a close reading of the structure and motifs in the print series of Claes Jansz. Visscher, Esaias van den Velde, Willem Buytewech, and Jan van de Velde.
Journey through Landscape in Seventeenth-Century Holland: The Harlem Print Series and Dutch Identity by Catherine Levesque
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995

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