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.

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 1600's 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 political, cultural, and economic context. 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.--Amazon.com.

"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 contents. 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. Illustrated and with a full representation of the major artists and the cities where genre painting flourished, this book will interest students, scholars, and general readers alike"--Publisher's description.

An Inner World, the exhibition co-curated by Lara Yeager-Crasselt of the Leiden Collection and Heather Gibson Moqtaderi, Assistant Director and Associate Curator of the Arthur Ross Gallery, features exceptional paintings by seventeenth-century Dutch artists working in or near the city of Leiden, including nine paintings from the Leiden Collection (New York) and one painting from the Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, MA). Ten rare seventeenth-century books drawn from the collection of University of Pennsylvania's Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts expand the intellectual and cultural contexts of the exhibition. Works by Gerrit Dou, Gabriel Metsu, Domenicus van Tol, Willem van Mieris, and Jacob Toorenvliet demonstrate how these artists developed a sustained interest in an inner world—figures in interior spaces, and in moments of contemplation or quiet exchange, achieved through their meticulous technique of fine painting. In this lavishly illustrated catalogue, essays penned by specialists in the field of early modern Dutch painting illuminate the exhibition's themes and lesser known artists, and shed new light on the fijnschilders, or fine painters, of Leiden. Yeager-Crasselt's essay explores the central themes of An Inner World through the lens of Leiden as a university city and Dutch artists' interests in the illusionism of space, candlelight, and painted surfaces. Shira Brisman examines the use of candlelight in seventeenth-century paintings and its role as a source of illumination as well as an indicator of the larger issue of the wax trade and the "outer world" of commerce. Last, Eric Jorink reflects on the confluence of art, science, and religion in the Dutch Golden Age.

This ground-breaking book offers the first sustained examination of Dutch seventeenth-century genre painting from a theoretically informed feminist perspective. Other recent works that deal with images of women in this field maintain the paradoxical combination of seeing the images as positivist reflections of “life as it was” and as emblems of virtue and vice. These reductionist practices deprive the works of their complex nature and of their place in visual culture, important frameworks that the book attempts to restore to them. Salomon expands the possibilities for understanding both familiar and unfamiliar paintings from this period by submitting them to a wide range of new and provocative questions. Paintings and prints from the first half of the century through to the second are analyzed to understand the changing social roles and values attributed to the sexes as they were introduced and reflected in the visual arts.

Is it possible to talk about Dutch art after 1680 outside the prevailing critical framework of the "age of decline"? Although an increasing number of studies are being published on the art and society of this period, genre painting of this era continues to be dismissed as an uninspired repetition of the art of the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century, known as the Dutch Golden Age. In this stunningly illustrated study, Aono reconsiders the long-dismissed genre painting from 1680-1750. Grounded in close analysis of a range of paintings and primary sources, this study illuminates the main features of genre painting, highlighting the ways in which these elements related to the painters' close connections to, on the one hand, collectors, and on the other, to classicism, one of the dominant artistic styles of that time. Three case studies, richly supplemented by a catalogue of 29 selected painters and their work, offer the first clear picture of the genre painting of the period while providing new insights into painters' activities, collectors' tastes and the contemporary art market.

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.