This lavishly illustrated book is the catalogue for an exhibition of the works of Jan Steen, coorganized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

In The Drawing Lesson, Jan Steen celebrates the art of the painter as teacher, placing his subjects in a familiar Dutch interior. This fascinating study of the painting - a masterpiece of the Museum's collection - examines the individual parts and larger patterns of the work and also recounts Steen's career and a history of the picture itself.

This publication includes six fictive conversations on the dynamism and processes that are at the basis of the actor's dramaturgy. These conversations never really took place - or at least not outside the author's own thinking process. The interlocutors are not based on real people. They are not psychologically realistic characters, but 'voices' that speak and argue from the perspective of their specific functions within the field of theatre. They are perspectives and functions that the author himself has experienced and through which he has reasoned throughout his whole professional life, being an actor, a director, a teacher and still considering himself to be a student. The dialogue format offers an opportunity to engage in a dynamic and open 'conversation' with these different functions and with the reader of the text, without any hierarchy among them. Complementary to the text, there are photos and a DVD with images of the author's work.

Walter Liedtke, curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has assembled a splendid catalog of Vermeer and his artistic milieu. Seven lengthy, well-illustrated chapters (Liedtke wrote five, Dutch art historians Michiel Plomp and Marten Jan Bok wrote the others) describe life in the city of Delft; the painters Carel Fabritius, Leonart Bramer, and others who preceded Vermeer; the careers of Vermeer and De Hooch; the making of drawings and prints in 17th-century Delft; and the collecting of art in the same period. The catalog follows: each painting, print, and drawing accompanied by a lengthy catalog essay. Oversize: 12.25x9.75". c. Book News Inc.

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.

Published to accompany an exhibition held in Sept. 2002 by the Albany Institute of History and Art.